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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 wor
by dekhn 1y 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.
- bitpush 1y ago[flagged]
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoYeah it comes off as braggy, but it’s only natural to be proud of your foresight
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- liamwire 1y agoNatural? Sure. Deserved? Not really, not unless we’re also forthcoming in our lack of foresight and the times we plainly got it wrong.
- shadowgovt 1y agoFWIW, 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."
- plemer 1y agoCould be either. Nevertheless, while tone is tricky in text, the writer is responsible for relieving ambiguity.
- spongebobstoes 1y agoeliminating ambiguity is impossible. the reader should work to find the strongest interpretation of the writer's words
- coderatlarge 1y agothat’s a lot to expect of readers… good writing needs to give readers every opportunity to find the good in it.
- shadowgovt 1y agoIt is a lot to expect of readers... It's also explicitly asked of us in this forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
- plemer 1y agofair point
- coderatlarge 1y agoit’s fine for a forum to try to have different expectations than the local cafe - that’s kind of like a host asking their guests to remove shoes before walking into their home. but it doesn’t really change a priori basic facts about good writing. perhaps this is the appropriate forum to reference pg https://paulgraham.com/writing44.html https://paulgraham.com/writing44.html https://paulgraham.com/essay.htm https://paulgraham.com/essay.htm
- dvaun 1y agoA 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.
- alfanick 1y agoI 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)
- camjw 1y ago100% but in this case they uh… didn’t work on it, it seems?
- varelse 1y ago[dead]
- project2501a 1y agoFrom 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
- deepdarkforest 1y ago> 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.
- modeless 1y agoLike 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?
- bitpush 1y agoSince 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.
- modeless 1y agoMicrosoft 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.
- 1y ago
- spankalee 1y agoDid 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.
- VirusNewbie 1y agoGoogler 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.
- semiinfinitely 1y agoNice wow 20% of the credit goes to you for thinking of this years ago. Kudos
- eleveriven 1y agoIt's easy to forget how early some of these ideas were being pushed internally