The same goes for AlphaGenome - it only takes a few hours to train the model, but it's freaking amazing what it can predict.
They are not really doing this, but it makes sense to me.
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?
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.
> As a google shareholder
How about you do some work? The world needs less armchair bosses and more do-ers.
1Y 86%
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.
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.
July 16, 2026 Responsibility & Safety
Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind
The global biosecurity landscape is rapidly evolving. Shifting natural ecosystems, global travel and the potential misuse of AI require greater vigilance — yet AI is also a critical tool for our response. We need frontier AI models, and the scientific advances they will enable, to respond to these challenges and help make society more resilient to events like future outbreaks.
Today, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs are sharing our joint approach to bioresilience.
Our work is twofold - to prevent threat actors from misusing our models, and to ensure that governments, scientists, biosecurity experts and our teams can harness these technologies to build a more resilient world.
Over the past 12 months, we have advanced more than 15 partnerships with government bodies, biosecurity organizations, and research groups to prevent threat actors from misusing our models, detect new outbreaks quickly and respond quickly and effectively.
We believe society must harness AI’s advancing capabilities to address infectious diseases and prepare for future outbreaks.
Breakthroughs like Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, which mapped the 3D structures of nearly all known proteins; Isomorphic Labs’ AI-powered Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE), which provides the real-world accuracy required to navigate novel biological systems with unprecedented precision; and AlphaGenome, which sheds light on genome function, are radically shifting the balance. Instead of just reacting to natural outbreaks or safety risks, we can now use these intelligent systems to help researchers design proactive defenses, accelerate the discovery of therapeutics, and safeguard the global health ecosystem with greater speed and precision.
With this in mind, we are making our AI models and agents available to trusted partners to support progress across three key areas: prevention, detection and response. Here are some examples:
To ensure our models, like Gemini, are safe and useful to experts, we follow a four-step safety process: threat modeling, evaluations, mitigations and monitoring.
We partner closely with in-house biologists, security experts and external partners to understand potential threats, test our models against them and build in robust safeguards.
Additionally, we’re working on adapting our SynthID watermarking technology to biology, which could help DNA synthesis providers screen for potentially risky, AI-generated biological sequences.
We are helping make pathogen surveillance more cost-effective. For example, our agent AlphaEvolve can optimize algorithms used for producing and analyzing metagenomic sequencing data, helping detect new outbreaks faster. This optimization allows for quicker and more accurate DNA analysis, making it cheaper to track diseases worldwide on a large scale.
We are also exploring how technologies like AlphaGenome and Protein Function annotation could be used to help detect and characterize pathogens from sequence data, identifying novel patterns and emerging threats faster than traditional methods.
Building on the scientific impact of AlphaFold, we are granting trusted researchers access to Google DeepMind’s latest AI systems to help accelerate the design of vaccines and other countermeasures for both known and novel threats.
To support government bodies and non-profit organizations during novel outbreaks, Isomorphic Labs has established a focused unit to rapidly deploy its drug design engine to design medical countermeasures that could address both naturally occurring pandemics and potential risks arising from the misuse of advanced AI. Working in collaboration with governments and global health authorities to advance a diverse range of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies enables the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine’s real-world impact for bioresilience.
This is a complex, long-term effort, and part of our broader approach to managing potential Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) risks, aligning with the proactive mitigations and rigorous evaluation protocols of our Frontier Safety Framework.
We are committed to working openly and collaboratively — with biosecurity labs, governments and the broader scientific community — to ensure AI is developed and deployed responsibly to help protect against one of society’s greatest risks.
To read more about our work and our call for new partnerships, see this full update on our approach.