Mukund Sridhar, Tech Lead for Gemini Deep Research at Google, breaks down technical limitations of vector search versus long-context LLMs.
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.”