Google PaLM 2 Gecko sparks open-source plea

My read: Google is unlikely to do this now, because its public AI story looks like it has moved on to Gemini and Gemma, so opening Gecko would be more symbolic than strategic.

• –Google's May 10, 2023 PaLM 2 launch post says Gecko can run on mobile devices and even offline, which is exactly why local-model fans keep bringing it up (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/google-palm-2-ai-large-language-model/).
• –The current PaLM docs describe Gecko as the smallest, most efficient PaLM 2 size and warn that the PaLM API is being decommissioned (https://ai.google.dev/palm_docs/palm).
• –Gecko is the embeddings-focused member of the family, so an open release would be more useful for edge search and RAG-style experiments than for general chat.
• –If Google ever did ship it open, the community would almost certainly jump straight to quantization, GGUF conversions, and phone/Raspberry Pi demos.
• –PaLM 2 did have a Product Hunt launch in 2023, but there is no dedicated Gecko launch page, so this is still a wish thread rather than a launch story.