Insight
Sridhar: Vector dot-product RAG breaks down on multi-attribute queries
“The tricky thing for RAG, it really works well because a lot of these things are doing like cosine distance, like a dot product kind of a thing, and that kind of gets challenging when your query side has multiple different attributes. The dot product doesn't r…”
Insight
Sridhar: Horizontal plug-and-play AI agent platforms are premature
“I feel like it's still early days for us, like to try to platformatize or like try to build these, oh, there are these five horizontal pieces. And you can plug and play and build your own agent. My personal opinion is we are not there yet. In order to build a …”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Gemini Deep Research falls back to RAG beyond context limits
“We also have we have retrieval mechanisms, if required. So we natively try to use the context as much as it's available beyond which you know, we have, like, a rag setup to figure out”
Opinion
Sridhar: High HLE benchmark scores do not translate to deep research products
“The benchmarks, at least the ones that we are seeing, they don't directly translate to the product. There's definitely some technical challenges that you can benchmark against, but they don't really, like if I do grade on
HLE, that doesn't really mean I'm a g…”
Insight
Sridhar: Deep Research targets multi-tab exploratory queries rather than direct searches
“There are things that, you know exactly what you're looking for and their search is still probably, you know, a very, you know, probably one of the best places to go. I think where deep research really shines is that, like, Multiple facets to your question, an…”
Insight
Sridhar: Sequential grounding on prior search turns is key for deep research
“This notion of being able to read outputs from the previous turn ground on that to decide what to do next, I think was key. Otherwise, you have, like, incomplete information, and your report becomes a little bit of a, like, a high-level bullet point.”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Deep Research Uses Base Gemini With Custom Post-Training
“Yeah, I don't think we have special access, per se. It's pretty much the same model. We, of course, have our own post-training work that we do, and Y'all can also, like, you know, you can fine tune from the base model and so on.”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Model decides whether follow-ups trigger new Deep Research runs
“One of the challenges is currently we kind of let the model decide based on your query, like amongst the three categories. So some, there is a boundary there. Like some of these things, depending on how deep you want to go, you might just want a quick answer v…”
Disclosure
Sridhar: Google launched Deep Research horizontally rather than for a single vertical
“Our primary goal was
Not to specialize in, in, in a particular vertical or target one type of user. We just want to put this in the hands of like we had like this busy parent persona and like various different user profiles and see like what people try to use …”
Insight
Sridhar: Thinking models inherently enable self-critiquing of partial steps
“The new generation models, especially with these thinking models, they unlock a few things. So I think one is obviously the, Better capability in, like, analytical thinking, like in math, coding, and these type of things, but also this notion of, you know, as …”
Insight
Sridhar: Autonomous AI discovery requires verifier sandboxes and second-order reasoning
“My personal opinion is the model doesn't, has to do the second order thinking and so on that we're seeing now with these new models, but also be able to play and test that out in an environment where you can, you know, verify and give it feedback so that it ca…”
Insight
Sridhar: Multi-minute AI research creates unique UX alignment and web navigation challenges
“This is one of the first times, you know, something takes about five, six minutes trying to perform your research, so there's a few challenges that brings, like, you want to make sure you're spending that time in the computer doing what the user wants, so ther…”
Assertion Supported
Sridhar: Gemini Deep Research operates primarily via search and page-deepening tools
“What's happening behind the scenes actually is we kind of give this research plan that is a contract and that you know, has been accepted. But then if you look at the plan, there are things that are obviously parallelizable. So the model figures out which of t…”
Assertion Supported
Sridhar: Deep Research uses self-critique to resolve source inconsistencies in reports
“So this happens iteratively until the model thinks it's finished all its steps, and then we kind of enter this analysis mode, and here there can be inconsistencies across sources. You kind of come up with an outline for the report, start generating a draft. Th…”
Insight
Sridhar: Multi-minute agent jobs require persistent state to survive inevitable failures
“If you build, like, five, six minute jobs, they're bound to be, like, failures and you don't want to, like, retry, lose your progress and so on, so this notion of, like, keeping state knowing what to retry and kind of keep the journey going.”
