Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

deepmind.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 193 posts

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#51

Post by kccqzy »

bitpush wrote: post #32
modeless wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incre…

Diversifying Microsoft away from the traditional cash cow of Windows and Office is the single most important strategy for Microsoft and he executed it well.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#52

Post by bitpush »

modeless wrote: post #36
bitpush wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incre…

Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL happened during his tenure, and probably wouldn't have happened under Ballmer. Turning the ship from a focus on protecting platform lock-in to meeting developers where they are is a huge accomplishment IMO.

> Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. True, but that's just few open source projects, albeit influential ones. There are soo many other companies doing influential open source projects.

I dont disagree with anything you said because turning a ship around is hard. But hand-to-heart, what big tech company is truly innovating to the future. Lets look at each company.

Apple - bets are on VR/AR. Apple Car is dead. So it is just Vision Pro

Amazon - No new bets. AWS is printing money, but nothing for the future.

Microsoft - No new bets. They fumbled their early lead in AI.

Google - Gemini, Waymo ..

I think Satya gets a lot more coverage than his peer at Google.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#53

Post by bitpush »

fwip wrote: post #49
jama211 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you don’t just get to pick which is which willy nilly just to push your opinions

Right, of course, but I don't see any evidence from which to assume that they're picking "willy nilly."

Read back what you just wrote. It is literally "willy nilly".

"Somethings are because of CEO, and some things are in spite of CEO"

And it was "willy nilly" attributed that enshittification was because of CEO (how do we know? maybe it was CFO, or board) and Gemini because of Demis (how do we know? maybe it was CEO, or CFO, or Demis himself).

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#54

Post by 331c8c71 »

jebarker wrote: post #50

I don't think DM is the only lab doing high-impact AI applications research, but they really seem to punch above their weight in it. Why is that or is it just that they have better technical marketing for their work?

This one seems like well done research but in no way revolutionary. People have been doing similar stuff for a while...

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#55

Post by modeless »

bitpush wrote: post #52
modeless wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL happened during his tenure, and probably wouldn't have happened under Ballmer. Turning the ship from a focus on protecting platform lock-in to meeting developers where they are is a huge accomplishment IMO.

> Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. True, but that's just few open source projects, albeit influential ones. There are soo many other companies doing influential open source projects. I dont disagree with anything you said because turning a ship around is hard. But hand-to-heart, what big tech company is truly innovating to the future. Lets look at each company. Apple - bets are on…

Waymo and DeepMind and the TPU program all predate Sundar as CEO.

IMO Google should have invested more in Waymo and scaled sooner. Instead they partnered with traditional automakers and rideshare companies, sought outside investment, and prioritized a prestige launch in SF over expanding as fast as possible in easier markets.

In other areas they utterly wasted huge initial investments in AR/VR and robotics, remain behind in cloud, and Google X has been a parade of boondoggles (excluding Waymo which, again, predates Sundar and even X itself).

You could also argue that they fumbled AI, literally inventing the transformer architecture but failing at building products. Gemini 2.5 Pro is good, but they started out many years ahead and lost their lead.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#56

Post by mattlondon »

oceanplexian wrote: post #44
deepdarkforest wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#57

Post by twothreeone »

Maybe "Release" requires a bit more context, as it clearly means different things to different people:

> AlphaGenome will be available for non-commercial use via an online API at http://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome

So, essentially the paper is a sales pitch for a new Google service.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#58

Post by geodel »

modeless wrote: post #25
deepdarkforest wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

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.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#59

Post by radialstub »

bitpush wrote: post #32
modeless wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incre…

> Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and strategic decisions

I am going to have to disagree with this. Azure is number 2, because MS is number 1 in business software. Cloud is a very natural expansion for that market. They just had to build something that isn't horrible and the customers would have come crawling to MS.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#60

Post by project2501a »

bitpush wrote: post #9
dekhn wrote: post #2

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 demo…

[flagged]

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

Post reply on HN