Google's year in review: areas with research breakthroughs in 2025
blog.google
blog.google
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.
- https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife
- https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nomi...
- https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expec...
- https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-m...
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.
Google could really easily be a purely rent seeking business but they are innovating, and if you are worried about the economy then this should seem like good news.
NYT: US GDP Grew 4.3%, surging in 3rd Quarter 2025 - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/business/us-economy-consu...
WSJ: Consumers Power Strongest US Economic Growth in 2 years - https://www.wsj.com/economy/us-gdp-q3-2025-2026-6cbd079e
The Guardian: US economy grew strongly in third quarter - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/23/us-economy-...
While consumer debt is at or near historical highs, it is in and of itself not a problem (broader economic risk).
What you need to look at as well is debt burden ratios and repayment behavior, not just raw totals.
Household debt service ratio (the share of disposable income spent on principal + interest payments) is well below historical crisis peaks (e.g., 2007–2008), suggesting households are currently spending a smaller share of income on debt payments than in past stress periods.
While total household debt is at record levels (~$18 trillion+), debt as a share of income or GDP has not reached past crisis peaks like 2008. That means debt growth hasn’t outpaced income growth as dramatically as in previous crises.
However, delinquency rates, especially for credit cards and student loans, are elevated, nearing or exceeding long-run highs outside recessions.
Mortgage delinquency rates remain lower than unsecured debt categories, but have ticked up slightly. Because they're relatively stable, it mutes broader systemic risk for now.
household debt per capita is also trending up, so larger population is not the driver of increased consumer debt.
Anyway, even clicking through to the PDF linked from GP's front page shows that every metric of US consumer credit is at or near all-time bests.
"The percentage of subprime borrowers – those with credit scores below 670 – who are at least 60 days late on their car loans has doubled since 2021 to 6.43%, according to Fitch Ratings. That’s worse than during the past three recessions – during the Covid pandemic, the Great Recession or the dot-com bust."
"America’s current subprime delinquency rate is at the second-highest level since the early 1990s. The only time it was higher: this past January. Cars are being repossessed at the highest rate since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009."
Does this mean you also think that "the (US) economy is tanking" OR do you agree with me that the economy is NOT tanking?
I'm not saying that Americans aren't under more economic strain than a few years ago (pre-pandemic), excluding 2007 - 2008.
However, I think if someone is going to claim the economy is tanking OR that Americans are fast becoming destitute or something extreme like that, you gotta give some quantitative data to back up that claim.
I haven't commented on "repayment behaviour" because your other comments don't actually mention that. Maybe there's something behind one of the links you posted that explains what you mean by it. I did have a quick look at the not-paywalled ones and didn't see anything of the kind.
(The above isn't a claim that actually the US economy is in a very real sense tanking, or that not-very-rich Americans are heading for destitution, or anything else so concrete. Just pointing out why the things you've been posting don't seem like they address the objection being made.)
1 - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-seeks-to-fire-bu...
While you are probably right in that The Economy, technically is growing, it doesn’t feel like it to normal people I know.
Do you think Americans' prosperity and wellbeing is tanking?
We can still look at quantitative and qualitative data.
The Economist ran a story in July "What is the richest country in the world in 2025"[1] in which they compared economies in three different ways: GDP per person at market exchange rates, Adjusted for price differences, and Adjusted for prices and hours worked.
Against those three metrics, the US is ranked in 4th, 7th, and 6th positions.
Even these statistics may need further interpretation or further adjustment (the article does a great job explaining why adjustments are needed for places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Ireland, Luxembourg).
> While you are probably right in that The Economy, technically is growing, it doesn’t feel like it to normal people I know.
Pew's research shows that most Americans rate the US economy negatively, with a strong partisan divide. 44% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rat the economy as excellent or good (up 8 points from April) while only 10% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners say so.
Arguments for "better off" than, say, 3 years ago: strong job market, economic growth, reduced debt burden.
Arguments for "worse off" than, say, 3 years ago: high cost of living.
Notwithstanding the pessimism and the visible fact that people are not as economically strong as a pre-pandemic (but certainly much more than 2007 - 2008), I don't know that I would say the US economy is "tanking" OR that Americans are becoming destitute.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/07/18/what-is-...
* Extreme poverty is at its lowest level in human history, down by over a billion people since 1990.
* More humans can read, write, and attend school than ever before, especially girls in lower-income countries.
* Global life expectancy has more than doubled compared to 1900
* Most countries continue to rise on human-development measures (health, education, income)
Yes, there's more room to keep improving, but the world keeps getting better & better.
Unemployment has increased.
Number of gig workers is at an all time high.
Layoffs have continued.
Polls show most people have financial anxiety and feel squeezed.
Inflation is not under control.
Buy now pay later usage is up as much as consumer spending is.
Income and wealth inequality are near records high.
GDP and consumer spending were also seen peaking before the last 5 recessions as well...
People always think the economy is tanking. I've heard "not in this economy" as an excuse every single year of my adult life. In retrospect, even in the boom years.
Seems you're operating off of a flawed premise.
Seems that there has been a lot of hype because in many ways, they are still lagging behind.
For PDF parsing and understanding, it's only anecdotal as it happened to me only once but Gemini was more accurate, that one time (a scientific paper).
Claude, when I was still subscribed to it, was in between gemini and GPT for code tasks. But the UI was too buggy and it was a bit too limited with their capacity threshold.
But in my daily usage? It's a fully different story.
They kind of are though?
Like, there is indeed amazing research supported by the company. The core user facing products are really declining in quality by being user hostile.
A search right now results in a made up LLM output followed by 4 ads disguised as content, and then maybe followed by the wanted result.
I’m not sure what happens inside the company for those two things to be true at once.
Google's main failing there is that they don't put enough effort into their search to keep up with that, and fail to raise the bar on garbage content and search engine manipulation.
LLM output in search results I'm not against. Do you need to open an entire website to learn how to sort an array in JavaScript with a lambda function? For many of the more common and more trivial requests, LLM output is well in "good enough".
Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.
They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.
Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.
Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.
They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.
To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.
Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.
Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.
Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.
Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.
Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.
This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
In the browser space I'm pleased that Firefox exists but they are so dependent on Google that they barely qualify as competitors.
In the search space though, competition is heating up for the first time. LLMs are a good alternative to a web search for many types of questions and Google is far from the only player here. Open AI, Anthropic, etc are competitors to Google. They are competing with Google in a way which Yahoo and Bing never really managed.
Anyway I do very much agree that Google enjoys multiple monopolies and that they shouldn't. My point is that with so much easy money out there it's refreshing to see them continuing to innovate. They don't really need to.
and have never paid Google a single penny for anything.
That's why Google is so dominant. That's why they are so skilled at data collection. The built a system that converts user data into dollars, so users don't have to pay. And users love, absolutely love, like their first born child and high school sweetheart combined into one, not having to pay for things.
Google is not the reason google sucks. People's unwillingness to compensate for services they use is. And before you comment with how you use Kagi, and Nebula, and Patreon. Yes, thank you. You are in the <0.1% of internet users who get it.
This is what healthy functioning regulatory bodies are supposed to do.
Stop complaining to people and start calling your legislators.
HN is one of the few places this message will land. My ask here is that you go to your lawmakers and tell them.
The system you exist in today is heavily regulated. Perhaps over-regulated. But you don't want to live in an unregulated chaos.
Maybe not directly but if hotels and the like have to pay 15% of their turnover to Google for ads to get visitors, either directly or via booking.com etc, then you end up paying that when you stay there.
That kind of stuff is where Google's billions come from.
72% Chrome --> Google
15% Safari --> Google
5% Edge --> Bing
2% Firefox --> Google
2% Opera --> Google
...
This alone implies a divestiture of Chrome should be in the cards.
Or maybe Google would be so kind to remove queries with URL bar origination from ad sales if there's a registered trademark (within some edit distance) within the query?
There isn't a small army of adversarial SEO sloptimizers eager to skirt the rules or bypass whatever Kagi does to purge SEO spam and downrank content mills.
It seems like they know how to improve (their offerings were way better in the past for me) but have moved to optimise for advertising revenue. IMO they've gone too far, they'll crash out of search in the next couple of years and won't be able to backtrack fast enough to keep their users.
Then they won't have cash to burn to fund the other [moonshot?] projects.
It feels like when VCs buy a company, coast on the name whilst stripping away all that made that name bankable; then they eventually run it into the ground, latch on to the next victim and on, and on. Except here Google are leeching off themselves.
Out thinking everyone else is very hard. The number of enterprises by spammers these days may exceed legitimate data being put on the internet. Much in the same way attempted spam far exceeded non-spam emails years ago.
At the same time who is even close to providing the services google provides?
That's exactly what Google is implying, isn't it?
By placing a redirect to an LLM at the top, and following it with bad search results, Google is saying "don't bother with the web, asking an LLM is better".
It is a very shortsighted thing to say, as a company whose moat and expertise is search. Particularly so when LLMs aren't yet proved to be a viable path to profit and there are other players in the game.
LLMs are clearly a useful product, I'm not arguing that. That's not sufficient for being the new Search.
To be the new Search, they also need LLMs to be performant enough to be profitable. And yet, stay unperformant enough that it isn't feasible to run them locally. And they have to stay useful long term, after the web is flooded by slop or content dries up because people stopped consuming the web directly. And a monetisation path needs to be found and survive legislation.
But more importatntly, it's not A or B. Gemini could have been pushed without sacrificing their golden-egg goose for the cause.
Ads subsidize experimentation of loss-generating moonshots until they mature into good businesses, or die.
- Their main source of revenue seems to be decaying, as if the talent that made it great isn't there anymore. Few people would tell you that search (or maps, or youtube) is better today than it ever was.
- Talent is there, and the quality of their moonshots is proof.
This contrast is curious.
>They kind of are though?
Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.
Google is not being described as a person.
Google is not a person.
Google just is.
Google!
Ads are 75% of their revenue and search has been getting progressively worse.
They are effectively this. With huge margins that allow them to have side projects.
Please tell me this humor...
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 seemingly unstoppable growth of renewable energy is Science’s 2025 Breakthrough of the Year
Makes you really optimistic about the future of humanity :)
The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097773 - Nov 2025 (141 comments)
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 (Mac app I built for this)
What am I missing?
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?
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.
...
> 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.
He lives just a few hours from me as well.
>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-df907d30c...)
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.
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
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.
The most important factor is confidence: After seeing them get some things mixed up a few times, I would have to manually verify the output myself anyway.
----
Re: the multiple comments that suggest to ask AI for code instead of feeding data to the chatbot:
I get what you mean, but I WANT the AI's non-deterministic AIness in this case!
For example, in some countries there are these "omni apps" that can be used for ride hailing or ordering food etc. The bank statement lists all such transactions with the same merchant name. I want the AI to do its AI thing to guess which transactions were rides and which were food deliveries, based on the prices and times etc. Like if there are multiple small transactions those are taxis, and the most expensive transactions during a day are my lunch and dinner.
And there are other cases, that would be too much "imperative" code that would fail anyway.
Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.
Using it via the CLI approach as an entirely different experience. It’s literally shocking what you can do.
For context, among many other things I have done this exact thing I am recommending. I just hit export on a Quickbooks instance of a complex multimillion dollar business and had Claude Code generate reports on various things I wanted to optimize and it just handles it in seconds.
The real limit to these tools is knowing what to ask for and stating the requirements clearly and incrementally. Once you get the hang of it, it’s literally shocking how many use cases you can find.
Replying to your edit. It just doesn’t. It’s almost effortless and fast to do exactly what you’re describing, capturing the subjective judgement of AI, to do what you want.
It took me a couple weeks to get very very good at it with good results in the first day or two. If you’re a competent programmer you’ll have the same experience and quickly if you get into the flow that’s being described to you.
I’m the ultimate skeptic I understand where you’re coming from but these workflows are crazy powerful.
But it's not that. I'm GIVING it the data.
It's simple, I can do it myself:
Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead. Spot associated fees with just a glance. Write that group of transactions down somewhere else.
That's it.
I tried different kinds of prompts, from imperative to declarative, including telling the AI to write a script for its own internal use, but they just don't seem to get it.
> It's simple, I can do it myself:
> Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead.
Can you do it without looking at the document? Just by ear? Every time correctly? Without missing something?
Maybe by next Christmas?
In short, you are holding it wrong. ;-)
How familiar are you with the concept of the jagged frontier? That is, AI does indeed fail at things we might expect a third grader to be capable of. However, it is also absolutely exceptional at a lot of things. The trick is A) knowing which is which and B) being able to update yourself when new capabilities are unlocked
So yeah, it’s unsurprising you found a use case it couldn’t trivially do. But being able to one-shot quite complicated applications that may have taken a day to get right previously is an astonishingly useful thing, no?
But I have found them to be very helpful for certain things, for example I can dump a huge log file and a chunk of the codebase and ask it to trace the root cause, 80% of the time it manages to find it. Would have taken me many hours otherwise.
Anyway the way to succeed in this task is to ask the model to write the program that analyses your bank statements, then read and check the program, and use it.
1. Put bunch of bank statements pdf in a folder, give a deterministic output for each pdf. Then ask Claude Code to do whatever I want. Good enough.
2. My preferred approach is similar to above but ask it to write a script instead, eg in Ruby. That way I have proper test, 100% guarantee it'll work and no regression. AI is non deterministic by default so asking any kind of agent to give a deterministic output seems unreliable to me. In the end I've turned it into a CLI, and been using it till now.
That's how I use AI. Indirectly to get what I want. Chat, CLI, it's all just a medium.
Sorry if I think your comment is a joke.
This is quite the statement. Even my elderly father finds it incredibly useful. And he doesn't even know how to turn up his iPhone ringer (which BTW it helps him with).
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.
???
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.
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.
Imagine if they add ads into the responses, who will use it then?
So I don’t doubt they’ve done well with LLMs, but when it comes to research what matters is long term bets. The only nice thing I can glean is they’re still investing in Quantum (although that too is a bit hype-y).
There’s absolutely been a lot of focus on LLMs, but they simply work very well at a lot of things.
That said, Carbon (C++ successor) is an active experimental (open source) project. Fuchsia (operating system, also open) is shipping to consumer products today. Non-LLM AI research capabilities were delivered at a level I’m not sure is matched by any other frontier lab? Hardware (TPUs, opentitan, etc). Beam is mind-blowing and IMO such a sleeper that I can’t wait for people to try.
So whilst LLMs certainly take the limelight, Google is still working on new languages, operating systems, ground-up silicon etc. few (if any?) companies are doing that.