PaLM 2

Closed weights Google 340B parameters May 2023

No estimate

No hardware requirements for this model

The weights for this model have not been published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any size. It is reachable only through its provider, and no graphics card changes that.

On record

Full specification

Everything on record for this model. Most of it describes how it was trained rather than how it runs — useful context for judging how much work went into it, and how it compares with models built at a different scale.

Origin

Who built this model, where, and when it was published.

Organisation
Google
Organisation type
Industry
Country
United States of America
Published
10 May 2023
Authors
Andrew M. Dai, David R. So, Dmitry Lepikhin, Jonathan H. Clark, Maxim Krikun, Melvin Johnson, Nan Du, Rohan Anil, Siamak Shakeri, Xavier Garcia, Yanping Huang, Yi Tay, Yong Cheng, Yonghui Wu, Yuanzhong Xu, Yujing Zhang, Zachary Nado, Bryan Richter, Alex Polozov, Andrew Nystrom, Fangxiaoyu Feng, Hanzhao Lin, Jacob Austin, Jacob Devlin, Kefan Xiao, Orhan Firat, Parker Riley, Steven Zheng, Yuhuai Wu,…

What it does

The problem areas the model was built for. A model can carry several of each.

Domain
Language
Task
Language modeling, Language modeling/generation

Size

How large the model is and how much data it was trained on. Parameters are the figure that decides whether it fits on a given graphics card.

Parameters
340B

Model Architecture: "PaLM-2 is a new state-of-the-art language model. We have small, medium, and large variants that use stacked layers based on the Transformer architecture, with varying parameters depending on model size. Further details of model size and architecture are withheld from external publication." However, the parameter count was leaked to CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/googles-palm-2-uses-nearly-five-times-more-text-data-than-predecessor.html

Training data
3,600,000,000,000 tokens

"The pre-training corpus is significantly larger than the corpus used to train PaLM" so greater than 6e+11. According to the leaked documents viewed by CNBC, the corpus was 3.6 trillion tokens or around 2.7*10^12 words. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/googles-palm-2-uses-nearly-five-times-more-text-data-than-predecessor.html

Training compute

The arithmetic performed to train the model, measured in floating-point operations. It is a measure of what the training run cost, not of how fast the finished model answers you.

Training compute
7.3 × 10²⁴ FLOP

Compute Requirements "Not reported." Paper suggests heuristic of C=6ND. Based on 340B parameters and 3.6T tokens, training compute would be around 7.3*10^24 FLOP.

How it was established
Operation counting

The training run

What it physically took to train: which chips, how many, for how long, and what that drew from the wall.

Training hardware
Google TPU v4
Compute cost
$5,014,267

Availability

Whether you can obtain the model and run it on your own hardware, which is what decides if any of the graphics-card figures on this page apply.

Weights
Closed — provider access only
Model access
API access
Training code
Unreleased

How it is classified

Labels the source dataset applies when tracking notable models, and how confident it is in the entry.

Frontier model
Yes
Foundation model
Yes
Likely above 10²³ FLOP
Yes
Why it is tracked
SOTA improvement,Training cost,Significant use,Highly cited

Significant use: Gmail and Google Docs have millions of users. SOTA performance: Table 5 "At I/O today, we announced over 25 new products and features powered by PaLM 2. That means that PaLM 2 is bringing the latest in advanced AI capabilities directly into our products and to people — including consumers, developers, and enterprises of all sizes around the world. Here are some examples: PaLM 2’s improved multilingual capabilities are allowing us to expand Bard to new languages, starting today. …

Record confidence
Likely
Citations
1,734

Sources

Where this record came from and when it was last checked.

Reference
PaLM 2 Technical Report
Last updated
18 December 2025

What the numbers mean

What this model is

PaLM 2 was published by Google, in United States of America, in May 2023. The organisation is categorised as industry.

It works in Language, and is recorded as doing language modeling, Language modeling/generation.

Its weights were never published, so it can only be reached through its provider. No graphics card changes that.

How it was trained

The training run consumed about 7.3 × 10²⁴ FLOP, on Google TPU v4. That figure describes the cost of creating it and has no bearing on how quickly it generates text.

The training set ran to roughly 3,600,000,000,000 tokens.

It is tracked in the underlying dataset for one reason in particular: sOTA improvement,Training cost,Significant use,Highly cited.

Answers

PaLM 2 — common questions

01

Who created PaLM 2?

PaLM 2 was published by Google, based in United States of America, categorised as industry.

02

When was PaLM 2 released?

PaLM 2 was published in May 2023. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

03

What is PaLM 2 used for?

PaLM 2 works in Language, and is recorded as handling language modeling, Language modeling/generation. Models frequently carry more than one of each, and the tags describe purpose rather than capability limits.

04

How much compute was used to train PaLM 2?

Around 7.3 × 10²⁴ FLOP, on Google TPU v4. That measures what producing the model cost and says nothing about how quickly it answers once trained — inference speed comes from memory bandwidth, not from the training budget.

05

What GPU do I need to run PaLM 2?

None. PaLM 2 is a closed model — its weights were never published, so it cannot be downloaded or run on your own hardware at any price. It is reachable only through its provider.

06

Is PaLM 2 open source?

No. PaLM 2 has not had its weights published, so it exists only as a service controlled by its owner.

07

How many parameters does PaLM 2 have?

PaLM 2 has 340B parameters. Model Architecture: "PaLM-2 is a new state-of-the-art language model. We have small, medium, and large variants that use stacked layers based on the Transformer architecture, with varying parameters depending on model size. Further details of model size and architecture are withheld from external publication." However, the parameter count was leaked to CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/googles-palm-2-uses-nearly-five-times-more-text-data-than-predecessor.html. That figure is the total, and it is what decides how much memory the model needs — roughly half a gigabyte per billion at the compression most people use.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 18 December 2025

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

This page starts from the model. If you already own a card and want to know everything it will run, start from the hardware instead.