The first PaliGemma shipped 54 checkpoints so anyone could recheck its scores. The second claims state of the art in five new fields and shipped two

When Google published PaliGemma in May 2024, it did something almost nobody else does: alongside the base weights it released fifty-four separate fine-tuned checkpoints, one per benchmark — COCO captioning, DocVQA, TextVQA, ScienceQA, remote-sensing question answering, screen description, segmentation. The technical report evaluated the model on nearly forty tasks, and anyone who doubted a number could download the exact weights that produced it and rerun the test. PaliGemma 2, announced on 5 December 2024, widened the claims considerably. Google reports state-of-the-art results on table structure recognition, molecular structure recognition, music score recognition, long fine-grained captioning and generating radiology reports from chest X-rays — five fields the first generation never touched. A count of the company's own repositories shows two task-specific checkpoints for that generation, both for long captioning on the DOCCI set. The other four claims ship as prose in the report, with pretrained and mixed-task weights from which a reader would have to reproduce the fine-tuning themselves. This is not a licence change or a retreat from openness — the weights of both generations are still there, on the same Gemma Terms of Use, in gated repositories that require accepting the terms. It is a narrowing of what can be checked. And it lands oddly against the traffic: in the thirty days to 17 September 2026, Google's repositories served 619,679 downloads of the first PaliGemma and 64,773 of the second, which the company itself describes as a drop-in replacement requiring no code changes. Nearly two years after the upgrade, nine out of ten downloads in this line still go to the older model — the one whose published figures can be verified one checkpoint at a time.