alt Hacker NewsGoogle's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025
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Science 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?
"The Thinking Game" is an absolutely fascinating and inspirational documentary about DeepMind and Demis Hassabis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
Makes you really optimistic about the future of humanity :)
They 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?
Anyone 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?
I wonder how much of this is Sergey Brin’s influence now that he’s been back
I 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)
Being an ad monopoly has its perks.
Sorry, 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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Was genuinely hoping to find there was some interesting research going on, but it’s all just AI stuff.
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.
Google 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.