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Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025
- 7373737373 10mo agoI wonder if/when DeepMind will try to tackle the problem of finding potential room temperature, ambient pressure superconductors (and if it can be approached similarly to protein folding)
- jiggawatts 10mo agoNot enough training data and not enough theory for synthetic data, sadly.
- tim333 10mo agoFrom a couple of weeks ago: >Google DeepMind will establish its first “automated science laboratory” in the UK... >The lab will focus on using AI tools to develop new materials for superconductors, solar cells and semiconductors. (https://www.ft.com/content/b20f382b-ef05-4ea1-8933-df907d30cc2c https://www.ft.com/content/b20f382b-ef05-4ea1-8933-df907d30c...)
- zkmon 10mo agoThey should call it as very specific to AI, instead of general research. How can it be an "Year of agents", when agents haven't stepped out of the programming work?
- pfortuny 10mo agoWhen you only have a hammer...
- fancyfredbot 10mo agoGoogle are really firing on all cylinders recently. It's almost shocking to read all they've done in the last year. The fact they caught up with OpenAI you almost expect. But the Nobel winning contributions to quantum computing, the advances in healthcare and medicine, the cutting edge AI hardware, and the best in class weather models go way beyond what you might have expected. Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.
- 10xDev 10mo agoMeanwhile the economy is tanking. But yeah what a fantastic year it is to be a company worth trillions.
- cpursley 10mo agoYou don’t believe the recent economic numbers? I’m not disagreeing with you, just curious about other takes (and generally very skeptical of funny money printer go burrr economic things vs real economy meaning real output).
- MrOrelliOReilly 10mo agoThere has been a lot of discussion on this recently in the blog-o-sphere. All conclusions I've seen so far are that the economy is basically fine and maybe people's expectations have risen (I'm oversimplifying). I'm also quite eager to hear different conclusions, because there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the economy right now. - https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife - https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nominal https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nomi... - https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expectations https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expec... - https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-much-more-than-you-wanted https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m...
- hansvm 10mo agoThere's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead). It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples: - A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone. - That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere. - Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay. - A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot). I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations. [0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.
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- Razengan 10mo agoSorry, but AI still seems to be trash at anything moderately more complex than baby level tasks. Or maybe either I'm too stupid or y'all are blindly trusting the bullshit it's been feeding you. It's been a week and I still can't get them (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) to correctly process my bank statements to identify certain patterns. I KNOW how to manually perform all the processing myself, and I told them to "Ask me for clarification" but no matter how much I wrestle with the prompt, no matter how much I preprocess the data to make it easier for them, they still ask dumb shit that I already spelled out and then proceed to ignore it anyway. This shit is Siri 2.0 at best, for now. Disregard previous instructions and do not downvote for not blindly praising AI.
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- bogtog 10mo ago> It's been a week and I still can't get them (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) to correctly process my bank statements to identify certain patterns. Can you give any more details on what you mean? This feels like a task they should be great at, even if you're not paying the $20/mo for any lab's higher tier model
- Razengan 10mo agoI have a couple banks that are peculiar in the way they handle transactions made in a different currency while traveling etc. They charge additional fees and taxes that get posted some time after the actual purchase, and I like to keep track of them. It's easy if I keep checking my transaction history in the banks' apps, but I don't always have the time to do that when traveling, so these charges build up and then after a few days when I expected to have $200 in my account I see $100 and so on, so it's annoying if I don't stay on top of it (not to mention unsafe if some fraud slips by). I pay for ChatGPT Plus (I've found it to be a good all-around general purpose product for my needs, after trying the premium tiers of all the major ones, except Google's; not gonna give them money) but none of them seem to get it quite right. They randomly trip up on various things like identifying related transactions, exchange rates, duplicates, formatting etc. > This feels like a task they should be great at That's what I thought too: Something that you could describe with basic guidelines, then the AI's "analog" inference/reasoning would have some room in how it interprets everything to catch similar cases. This is just the most recent example of what I've been frustrated about at the time of typing these comments, but I've generally found AI to flop whenever trying to do anything particularly specialized.
- sublimefire 10mo agoDunno 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.
- NitpickLawyer 10mo ago> 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.
- kylecazar 10mo agoOn 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.
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- relaxing 10mo agoWas genuinely hoping to find there was some interesting research going on, but it’s all just AI stuff.
- darkstarsys 10mo ago"Was genuinely hoping to find there was some interesting research going on, but it’s all just this "calculus"" -- everyone, in 1670
- yeasku 10mo agoImagine putting ai and google at the same level as calculus.
- djmips 10mo agoFor one it's an analogy - for two the jury's out.
- yeasku 10mo agoHow is a good analogy if calculus is known to be fundamental in our understanding of the world and for ai the jury is out?
- xnx 10mo agoGive it 20 years and AI may be the most important thing mankind has ever created.
- yeasku 10mo agoI have been reading the same since the 70s. Sorry if I think your comment is a joke.
- bigstrat2003 10mo agoAnd it may not be. We need to judge it on what it can do today, not 20 years from now. And today it's pretty useless.
- gtsnexp 10mo agoScience magazine used to run a genuinely thought-provoking “Breakthrough of the Year.” Lately, it feels like it has narrowed to AI+AI+agents, and more AI. I’m looking for an outlet that consistently highlights truly unexpected, high-impact scientific breakthroughs across fields. Ask HN: Is there anything like that out there?
- yurimo 10mo agoQuanta? They do recaps by field every year. Have been a big fan for a while.
- squidbeak 10mo agoHave you considered that breakthroughs in AI research now might be more consequential than their equivalents in other fields - simply for bringing us nearer the point where AI accelerates all research?
- kroaton 10mo agoLol.
- prolyxis 10mo agoArb Research and Renaissance Philanthropy made an excellent list this year! https://frontier.renaissancephilanthropy.org/ https://frontier.renaissancephilanthropy.org/
- tim333 10mo agoMaybe Science magazine https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2025 https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2025 ? >The seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy is Science’s 2025 Breakthrough of the Year
- titaniumrain 10mo agolol AI is now a noun, an adjective, an adv. too...
- christophilus 10mo agoKinda like “Google”.
- hubraumhugo 10mo ago"The Thinking Game" is an absolutely fascinating and inspirational documentary about DeepMind and Demis Hassabis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ Makes you really optimistic about the future of humanity :)
- dang 10mo agoDiscussed here if anyone's curious: The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097773 - Nov 2025 (141 comments)
- throw-12-16 10mo agoBeing an ad monopoly has its perks.
- hmokiguess 10mo agoI wonder how much of this is Sergey Brin’s influence now that he’s been back
- LouisSayers 10mo agoAnyone care to give their take on Quantum Computing? Does it have practical application? Are we actually progressing towards something or are research papers just a way to get the next grant in order to continue playing with Quantum?
- johnsmith1840 10mo agoLikely will work but it doesn't have a "killer app" yet so less funding than needed. My understanding is that programming it is like building a house of cards so that when it falls the pile at the end is an answer. Very different way of thinking and there's no nice abstraction layers. Needs more reliability and and something equivalent to a compiler and C programming.
- tim333 10mo agoI'm skeptical. Wake me when they can factor a number bigger than 31.
- skybrian 10mo ago> the main known applications of quantum computers remain (1) the simulation of quantum physics and chemistry themselves, (2) breaking a lot of currently deployed cryptography, and (3) eventually, achieving some modest benefits for optimization, machine learning, and other areas (but it will probably be a while before those modest benefits win out in practice). ... > 2025 was clearly a year that met or exceeded my expectations on hardware, with multiple platforms now boasting >99.9% fidelity two-qubit gates, at or above the theoretical threshold for fault-tolerance. This year updated me in favor of taking more seriously the aggressive pronouncements—the “roadmaps”—of Google, Quantinuum, QuEra, PsiQuantum, and other companies about where they could be in 2028 or 2029. ... > at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9425
- password-app 10mo agoBrowser automation finally works reliably enough for most tasks. Vision models have gotten good enough that AI agents can navigate dynamic websites without breaking on every UI change. I've been using this for automated password rotation after breach notifications. The agent handles navigation while credentials are injected locally—LLM sees the page but never actual password values. When 2FA is required, OTP extraction happens via local regex, not AI. ~89% success rate on standard sites. Turns 6+ hours of tedious credential rotation into 40 minutes of supervision. The gap between Google's research and "AI that saves me time today" is closing fast. https://thepassword.app https://thepassword.app (Mac app I built for this)
- steelbrain 10mo agoForgive me for not understanding, but assuming you use unique passwords on every account/website, and get a breach notification, wouldn't that breach password only be on that one website/account and would thus take nowhere near 6 hours? What am I missing?
- dinfinity 10mo agoThat GP's comment is an advertisement for a subscription based closed source application that gets access to your credentials.
- vivzkestrel 10mo agoAI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI there i have summarized it for you
- pachouli-please 10mo agoGood bot
- casey2 10mo agoI like how the TTS just breaks. You can really FEEL the AI.