Comment by dekhn
1 day ago
When I went to work at Google in 2008 I immediately advocated for spending significant resources on the biological sciences (this was well before DM started working on biology). I reasoned that Google had the data mangling and ML capabilities required to demonstrate world-leading results (and hopefully guide the way so other biologists could reproduce their techniques). We made some progress- we used exacycle to demonstrate some exciting results in protein folding and design, and later launched Cloud Genomics to store and process large datasets for analytics.
I parted ways with Google a while ago (sundar is a really uninspiring leader), and was never able to transfer into DeepMind, but I have to say that they are executing on my goals far better than I ever could have. It's nice to see ideas that I had germinating for decades finally playing out, and I hope these advances lead to great discoveries in biology.
It will take some time for the community to absorb this most recent work. I skimmed the paper and it's a monster, there's just so much going on.
> Sundar is a really uninspiring leader
I understand, but he made google a cash machine. Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B. a 10x profit growth at this scale well, its unprecedented, the numbers are inspiring themselves, that's his job. He made mistakes sure, but he stuck to google's big gun, ads, and it paid off. The transition to AI started late but gemini is super competitive overall. Deepmind has been doing great as well.
Sundar is not a hypeman like Sam or Cook, but he delivers. He is very underrated imo.
Like Ballmer, he was set up for success by his predecessor(s), and didn't derail strong growth in existing businesses but made huge fumbles elsewhere. The question is, who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?
Since we're on the topic of Microsoft, I'm sure you'd agree that Satya has done a phenomenal job. If you look objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments? One word - Azure. Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and strategic decisions. But that's it. The "vibes" for Microsoft has changed, but MS hasnt innovated at all.
Satya looked like a genius last year with OpenAI partnership, but it is becoming increasingly clear that MS has no strategy. Nobody is using Github Copilot (pioneer) or MS Copilot (a joke). They dont have any foundational models, nor a consumer product. Bing is still.. bing, and has barely gained any market share.
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This is kind of bullshit. One can equally say Satya was setup for success by Ballmer as he stepped away graciously taking all the blame so new CEO can start unencumbered.
> who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?
100% it's Demis.
A Demis vs. Satya setup would be one for the ages.
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He might have delivered a lot of revenue growth yea, but Google culture is basically gone. Internally we're not very far from Amazon style "performance management"
To upper management types that’s a feature not a bug.
He delivered revenue growth by enshittifying Goog's products. Gemini is catching up because Demis is a boss and TPUs are a real competitive advantage.
You either attribute both good and bad things to the CEO, or dont. If enshittifying is CEO's fault, then so is Gemini's success.
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Demis reports to Sundar. All of Demis's decisions would have been vetted by and either approved, rejected, or refined by Sundar. There's no way to actually distinguish how much of the value was from whom, unless you have inside info.
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> Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B.
Google's revenue in 2014 was $75B and in 2024 it was $348B, that's 4.64 times growth in 10 years or 3.1 times if corrected for the inflation.
And during this time, Google failed to launch any significant new revenue source.
Tim Cook is the opposite of a hypeman.
I like that you are writing as a defense of Google and Sundar.
Their brand is almost cooked though. At least the legacy search part. Maybe they'll morph into AI center of the future, but "Google" has been washed away.
World is much.. much bigger than HN bubble. Last year, we were all so convinced that Microsoft had it all figured out, and now look at them. Billion is a very, very large number, and sometimes you fail to appreciate how big that is.
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Maybe they'll morph into AI center of the future
Haven't you been watching the headlines here on HN? The volume of major high-quality Google AI releases has been almost shocking.
And, they've got the best data.
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> The transition to AI started late but gemini is super competitive overall.
If by competitive you mean "We spent $75 Billion dollars and now have a middle of the pack model somewhere between Anthropic and Chinese startup", that's a generous way to put it.
Citation needed. Gemini 2.5 pro is one of the best models there is right now, and it doesn't look like they're slowing down. There is a LLM response to basically every single Google search query, it's built into the billions of android phones etc. They're winning.
By competitive, i mean no.1 in LM arena overall, in webdev, in image gen, in grounding etc. Plus, leading the chatbot arena ELO. Flash is the most used model in openrouter this month as well. Gemma models are leading on device stats as well. So yes, competitive
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Gemini 2.5 Pro is excellent. Top model in public benchmarks and soundly beat the alternatives (including all Claudes and that Chinese startup’s flagship) in my company’s internal benchmarks.
I’m no Google lover — in fact I’m usually a detractor due to the overall enshittification of their products — but denying that Gemini tops the pile right now is pure ignorance.
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Nice wow 20% of the credit goes to you for thinking of this years ago. Kudos
It's easy to forget how early some of these ideas were being pushed internally
Did you ride the Santa Cruz shuttle, by any chance? We might have had conversations about this a long while ago. It sounded so exciting then, and still does with AlphaGenome.
Googler here ---^
I have incredibly mixed feelings on Sundar. Where I can give him credit is really investing in AI early on, even if they were late to productize it, they were not late to invest in the infra and tooling to capitalize on it.
I also think people are giving maybe a little too much credit to Demis and not enough to Jeff Dean for the massive amount of AI progress they've made.
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A charitable view is that they intended "ideas that I had germinating for decades" to be from their own perspective, and not necessarily spurred inside Google by their initiative. I think that what they stated prior to this conflated the two, so it may come across as bragging. I don't think they were trying to brag.
I don't find it rude or pretentious. Sometimes it's really hard to express yourself in hmm acceptable neutral way when you worked on truly cool stuff. It may look like bragging, but that's probably not the intention. I often face this myself, especially when talking to non-tech people - how the heck do I explain what I work on without giving a primer on computer science!? Often "whenever you visit any website, it eventually uses my code" is good enough answer (worked on aws ec2 hypervisor, and well, whenever you visit any website, some dependency of it eventually hits aws ec2)
100% but in this case they uh… didn’t work on it, it seems?
FWIW, I interpreted more as "This is something I wanted to see happen, and I'm glad to see it happening even if I'm not involved in it."
That's correct. I can't even really take credit for any of the really nice work, as much as I wish I could!
Could be either. Nevertheless, while tone is tricky in text, the writer is responsible for relieving ambiguity.
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From Marx to Zizek to Fukuyama^1, 200 years of Leftist thinking nobody has ever came close to say "we can fix capitalism".
What makes you think that LLMs can do it?
[1] relapsed capitalist, at best, check the recent Doomscroll interview
Yeah it comes off as braggy, but it’s only natural to be proud of your foresight
Natural? Sure. Deserved? Not really, not unless we’re also forthcoming in our lack of foresight and the times we plainly got it wrong.
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