PaLM
Pathways Language Model (540B)
Google's 540-billion-parameter language model, three times larger than GPT-3 and trained on Google's TPU v4 supercomputer. It set state-of-the-art on dozens of benchmarks but was never released as a product, becoming the largest AI model ever to live and die entirely as a research artifact.
Context
2K
Up to 2,048 tokens
Why it matters
PaLM is the cautionary tale every Big Tech AI strategy now studies. Capability without distribution is not a competitive moat. The industry's current obsession with shipping cadence over technical novelty traces directly to this miss.
Core Capabilities
Long Documents
Handles entire codebases, books, and multi-doc RAG.
Generative
Produces images, video, audio, or other media.
Context Window
2k tokens
short prompt
4k Chat 聊天
32k Long docs 长文档
128k Books 整本书
400k Multi-doc 多文档
1M Codebase 整个代码库
10M
2k
Availability
API
Not available
Product / App
Not available
Open Source
Not released
Enterprise
—
Pricing Model
Research artifact
Not commercially released.
Research Capability / Performance
Where this model sits relative to the middle 60% of models in the tree. All scores are 0–10 (higher is better).
Lower 20% Upper 80% This model
Context / memory
Context window size · log-scaled
6.0
9.0
0.0
Lower 20% 20th percentile — 20% of models score below this This model Where the current model lands Upper 80% 80th percentile — only 20% of models score above this
Percentile boundaries are computed across every model in the tree that reports the underlying benchmark for each capability.
What it feels like
- Language model from Google — see the linked sources below for benchmark and review coverage
Best use cases
- General-purpose tasks within Google's deployment footprint
- See the model spec and sources block for benchmarked use cases
Tools to try
Not ideal for
- Tasks far outside the modalities listed in this model's spec
- Workflows where a more recent successor in the same family scores higher