zlacker

Dunno about you but to me it reads as a failure. It basically has AIAIAI, although they lost much of the ground to other companies whilst having an upper hand years ago. Then they mention 5yr anniversary of alphafold, also one of the googlers did research in the 80s for which he became a candidate for Nobel prize this year. And lastly, there was a weather model.

They tried so hard to be in the media over the last year that it was almost cringe. Given that most of their money is coming from advertising I would think they have an existential crisis to make sure folks are using their products and the ecosystem.

>>sublim+(OP)
> Dunno about you but to me it reads as a failure.

???

This is a wild take. Goog is incredibly well positioned to make the best of this AI push, whatever the future holds.

If it goes to the moon, they are up there, with their own hardware, tons of data, and lots of innovations (huge usable context, research towards continuous learning w/ titans and the other one, true multimodal stuff, etc).

If it plateaus, they are already integrating into lots of products, and some of them will stick (office, personal, notebooklm, coding-ish, etc.) Again, they are "self sustainable" on both hardware and data, so they'll be fine even if this thing plateaus (I don't think it will, but anyway).

To see this year as a failure for google is ... a wild take. No idea what you're on about. They've been tearing it for the past 6 months, and gemini3 is an insane pair of models (flash is at or above gpt5 at 1/3 pricing). And it seems that -flash is a separate architecture in itself, so no cheeky distillation here. Again, innovations all over the place.

>>sublim+(OP)
On the AI front, I think they definitely had lost ground, but have made significant progress on recovering it in 2025. I went from not using Gemini to mostly using 3 Pro.

Just the fact that they managed to dodge Nvidia and launch a SOTA model with their own TPU's for training/inference is a big deal, and takes a lot of resources and expertise not all competitors have in-house. I suspect that decision will continue to pay dividends for them.

As long as there is competition in LLM's, Google will now be towards the front of the pack. They have everything they need to be competitive.

>>sublim+(OP)
One AI company is losing billions and sharecropping off of everyone’s infrastructure with no competitive advantage and the other is reporting record revenues and profits, funding its AI development with its own money, has its own infrastructure and not dependent on Nvidia. It also has plenty of real products where it can monetize its efforts.

>>sublim+(OP)
You write like someone who hasn't used Gemini in a very long time. In no sense whatever have Google lost ground to other AI companies this year. Rather the other way around.

>>sublim+(OP)
I agree with this take. Their insane focus on generative AI seems a bit short sighted tbh. Research thrives when you have freedom to do whatever, but what they’re doing now seems to be to focus everyone on LLMs and those who are not comfortable with that are asked to leave (eg the programming language experts who left/were fired).

So I don’t doubt they’ve done well with LLMs, but when it comes to research what matters is long term bets. The only nice thing I can glean is they’re still investing in Quantum (although that too is a bit hype-y).

>>squidb+O6
The pace of change is quite fast, keeping on top of it is hard, but most importantly it is marginal from the user perspective. We do not have good tools to navigate the use of these models well yet, except coding, and coders can switch the model in a dropdown.

Imagine if they add ads into the responses, who will use it then?

>>pm90+i7
Disclosure: I work @ goog, opinions my own

There’s absolutely been a lot of focus on LLMs, but they simply work very well at a lot of things.

That said, Carbon (C++ successor) is an active experimental (open source) project. Fuchsia (operating system, also open) is shipping to consumer products today. Non-LLM AI research capabilities were delivered at a level I’m not sure is matched by any other frontier lab? Hardware (TPUs, opentitan, etc). Beam is mind-blowing and IMO such a sleeper that I can’t wait for people to try.

So whilst LLMs certainly take the limelight, Google is still working on new languages, operating systems, ground-up silicon etc. few (if any?) companies are doing that.

>>pm90+i7
Google has been at the forefront of “AI” and Machine Learning forever. I didn’t appreciate this myself until listening to the Acquired podcast episode

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google-the-ai-company

>>sublim+Md
Gemini already has ads. If you ask it a question that can be answered that way, it will present results from its shopping carousel, for example.