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AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

deepmind.google

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Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#61

Post by agumonkey »

tiahura wrote: post #42
agumonkey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

who didn't ? I meant in the future, if this becomes a long term fruitful economic value (sorry but video and image generation have no value, it's laughable and used for cheap needs, and most of the time people are very annoyed by it).

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#62

Post by zem »

bitpush wrote: post #53
fwip wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

at the very least, enshittification is a company policy and gemini is a specific product.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#63

Post by modeless »

radialstub wrote: post #59
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…

> 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.

You could just as easily make the argument that cloud is a very natural expansion for Google given their expertise in datacenters and cloud software infrastructure, but they are still behind. Satya absolutely deserves credit for Microsoft's success here.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#64

Post by echelon »

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?

> who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?

100% it's Demis.

A Demis vs. Satya setup would be one for the ages.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#65

Post by mattigames »

bitpush wrote: post #34
CuriouslyC wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really, pressure to move into AI is so vast that it in reality the CEO had little saying about moving into it or not, and they already had smart employees to make it a reality, vastly different that what happened with enshitification which Gemini is part of, just recently people were complaining that the turn off button was hijacked to start Gemini in their Android phones.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#66

Post by bogtog »

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…

> If you look objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments?

Managing to keep the MS Office grift going and even expand it with MS Teams is something

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#67

Post by nextos »

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?

In biology, Arc Institute is doing great novel things.

Some pharmas like Genentech or GSK also have excellent AI groups.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#68

Post by gordonhart »

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.

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.

Re: AlphaGenome: AI for better understanding the genome

#70

Post by VirusNewbie »

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…

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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