Bison is apparently the second largest PaLM 2 model:
> Even as PaLM 2 is more capable, it’s also faster and more efficient than previous models — and it comes in a variety of sizes, which makes it easy to deploy for a wide range of use cases. We’ll be making PaLM 2 available in four sizes from smallest to largest: Gecko, Otter, Bison and Unicorn. Gecko is so lightweight that it can work on mobile devices and is fast enough for great interactive applications on-device, even when offline.
Did anyone see what unicorn is capable of? Why is it not publicised? Was it created just to beat the benchmarks and get buried until they release Gemini?
Versions
Resource ID Release date Release stage Description
text-bison@001 2023-05-10 Public Preview Quality improvements and restage -001 as the first stable base model release
But would be interested to know if that was not the case. They seemed to be saying that PaLM 2 was rolling out. Also the pages say its a preview. So why would they be previewing the old model still?
> Generative AI Studio, Model Garden, and PaLM 2 for Text and Chat are moving from trusted tester availability to preview, meaning everyone with a Google Cloud account has access.
> Codey, Imagen, Embeddings API for images, and RLHF are available in Vertex AI through our trusted tester program, and Chirp, PaLM 2, Embeddings API, and Generative AI Studio for text are available in preview in Vertex AI to everyone with a Google Cloud account.
It seems like you are right and general PaLM 2 is available. Fine-tuned code-generation model (Codey) is not publicly available yet.
Edit: It seems I can't use my free credits on Vertex APIs... Not nice.