Our Approach to Bioresilience: Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind

I agree with you for the most part. However they have been raising a lot of cash, and to do so they took on a ton of debt.

It's a totally reasonable investment as long as they are within shooting distance of the market leaders, but the more they lag behind (i.e. the longer it takes for them to release their next model on par with industry leaders) the more hurt they're going to be in.

If they can't materialize returns off the tens of billions of dollars they just raised then it will come back to bite them hard.

Luckily they have a ton of options (such as selling compute) but it's still not a great look and the market is going to hammer them given the opportunity.

> they have world class research

It's a pretty bad look when all they do is shed researchers. Whether to other labs, or to people launching their own things. "I work at Google" doesn't have the ring it had 10-20 years ago either, something that OAI and especially Anthropic enjoy nowadays.

Deepmind is looking less and less like a place of prestige, and more and more like a smash-and-grab.

I see that being about as likely as IBM doing the same.

I'm too young to have seen the arc of Xerox PARC first hand, so to me stuff like the innovators dilemma made sense, but didn't feel particularly visceral.

AI Studio (or whatever their internal name is) is the first time in my own lifetime witnessing how real deep it really cuts.

Google realizes GCP is too slow and overwrought to get mindshare vs nimble OpenAI and Ant, spins up a new product org as a work around, and that product org ends up moving obviously much faster than Vertex, but also with a sort of malaise (relative to the technology they're supposed to be selling) that makes it clear to me that Google actually cannot move like a startup anymore.

That might seem super obvious to most people, but I grew up with Google being the startup. I knew they grew up to be a mega cap, but I guess I always assumed the bones of a startup were still in there.

There's no bones. It actually feels like a mini-identity crisis for myself to realize there is no startup left in Google: what other invariants I assumed about people and organizations are just plain wrong?

Yeah, I would be curious to know what kind of returns they’re seeing from Isomorphic labs given AlphaFold itself is publicly available. From what I’ve read, the deals they’ve reached with the major Pharma companies could result in billions in returns, but they come as royalties or are tied to performance metrics. It’s going to be hard to know how valuable the investments made in this space will be for probably another decade.

Anthropic is the company that makes the most noise about AI safety, in all the good and bad ways. While being THE frontier model player to watch.

They got way less resources than OpenAI. They don't have the infinite compute or the biggest userbase. And they still punch way above their weight with just about every release.