Designer, Google DeepMind
Joined April 2009
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This is another example of something that I thought would take years to solve and yet here we are.
Johnnie Manzari retweeted
Asked Gemini 4 Argon for an interactive museum of Apple computers.
...and didn't provide any images or data.
It scraped archival Mac photos, wrote a tool to clean the images, pulled 50 years of specs, and built a 3D Cover Flow with UI that morphs to match the decade you’re in.
Today we are rolling out Gemini 4 Argon globally in the Gemini API, to Pro + Ultra in Gemini App, and Ultra subs in Antigravity!
Argon is a huge step forward for Gemini, and a labor of love. This model has been battle tested by over 100,000 people at Google over the last month, with so much new innovation, ambition, and hard work baked into this release. The team has been heads down over the last 6 months working to make this possible across the stack (research, infra, safety, eng, etc).
We rolled the model out to cyber defenders as part of our fairwind program and early access customers over the last 2 weeks, it has been amazing to see and talk to folks who are now using this model daily. Seeing the models writing capability, raw knowledge and persistence for coding, paired with new features like 1M token output when the model needs to work more has gotten me even more excited about our path ahead.
This is just the start of the Gemini 4 era. As you saw with 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 Flash, our iteration speed with Gemini is fast : ) Now with Gemini 4 Argon to work from, I am cannot wait to see the progress continue, and most importantly see what this new model enables for the world.
This is such a special moment in the arc of technology, as millions of people everyday tackle problems they could never have thought possible before. Gemini 4 Argon was built to help you tackle the hardest problems. I have personally felt this spark with Argon and hope you do too. Onwards!!
After Steve died there was a lot of debate in Silicon Valley around “Who is the next Steve Jobs?” Who would be not just making innovative products, but serving as the spiritual guide for the tech industry, and an elder statesman on difficult social issues. It’s been 15 years, and the more time passes, the more singular Steve appears to be.
Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011
Today marks 15 years since he died.
Couple years ago Apple created a book titled “Make Something Wonderful” to celebrate his life, and gave it to Apple employees.
I got the physical and digital versions of the book, would you like to see more photos?
When people think of Steve Jobs they think of Apple
But he’s done hardware, software, and even movies, without him Pixar and the new era of animations wouldn’t have become what it is today.
He released Toy Story movie in 1995.
Steve passed away in his home in Palo Alto, California at the age of 56, because his pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor came back.
Steve refused to go through the chemotherapy, he believed that his tumor was discovered early enough in 2003, that vegan/fruitarian diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies, and juice fasts were enough to get rid of it
Eventually in 2004 he had a surgery to remove it, but believed he didn’t need chemotherapy and the surgery was enough.
He kept saying that he’s cancer free and got a second life when doctors believed he needed chemotherapy or radiation or else his tumor may come back.
RIP Steve Jobs.
The best product people have intense clarity in their point of view. I remember a meeting many years ago where people took Jony Ive through the state of the art foldable display technology for that time. This was back with plastic-feeling screens that had a big crease down the middle. His feedback was simply: “Your idea is a big display. But this isn’t a great display. So you don’t have an idea.” It might have taken about 10 years after that to make a great foldable display— nano texture, updated hinge mechanisms, behind display camera.
This single transition says so much about how Apple approaches a problem. Other companies copied the aspect ratio, more or less, but because they didn’t understand the motivation and reasoning behind it, they couldn’t copy the essence of what makes it so successful. If you have this aspect ratio, and do a lot of work in software, it’s no longer two products glued together, it appears as one seamless, continuous product. This is complicated to do when the inside display is a different display technology, with a different bezel thickness, and a camera in a different location (hence putting it behind the display on the inside). You don’t begin with a product size and shape, you begin with the idea that this is one singular product and make every decision in service of that idea.
This single transition says so much about how Apple approaches a problem. Other companies copied the aspect ratio, more or less, but because they didn’t understand the motivation and reasoning behind it, they couldn’t copy the essence of what makes it so successful. If you have this aspect ratio, and do a lot of work in software, it’s no longer two products glued together, it appears as one seamless, continuous product. This is complicated to do when the inside display is a different display technology, with a different bezel thickness, and a camera in a different location (hence putting it behind the display on the inside). You don’t begin with a product size and shape, you begin with the idea that this is one singular product and make every decision in service of that idea.
At a lot of companies, the internal concepts look good but what ships lacks the same level of craft. This iPhone Duo transition is even better in the shipping form than what it looked like internally when I last saw it. This isn’t luck or something that occurs easily; people are putting in long hours to make this happen.
At a lot of companies, the internal concepts look good but what ships lacks the same level of craft. This iPhone Duo transition is even better in the shipping form than what it looked like internally when I last saw it. This isn’t luck or something that occurs easily; people are putting in long hours to make this happen.
Steve Jobs’ greatest product wasn’t the iPhone or the Mac, it was Apple itself: the machine that makes the machine. When Tim Cook took over, conventional wisdom was that Apple would slide into irrelevance, because Steve’s system required a singular product visionary driving the entire company. I would argue Tim’s greatest product and legacy isn’t the Watch or Services or scaling the iPhone, it was showing how to run a disciplined, top-down company with a team vs an individual. Maybe if his talent in operations was scaling, you could say he not only scaled the products, he showed how to scale the company, too.
Sugar Bowl found my iPhone that I lost in December snowboarding. It was sitting under the Disney lift for 7 months buried snow and sitting in the sun. Not a scratch on it. Works perfectly. Incredible.
User interfaces are about to go through another big transformation, on the scale of command line to GUI, if not bigger. The new tools aren’t about making the old designs more efficiently, they are about making entirely new experiences.
Johnnie Manzari retweeted
One of my first projects as an EPM. The tape length being accurate in each spool 👌
I’ve been using this for UI design, and it’s incredible. I’m old enough to remember when getting a video to loop seamlessly was a whole project unto itself.
I’ve joined the Google DeepMind design team. I’ve spent my professional career working as a toolmaker, and while I’ve been lucky to have contributed to some incredible products in the past, I may well look back on the work here as the most important when it comes to building tools that are helpful, delightful, and genuinely enriching to people’s lives.
I haven’t worked at Apple in 6 months and the multi lens switching to hit focus on this still gives me anxiety. (It starts Macro on the Super Wide lens because the bottom of the window is in focus then realizes it needs to hop to the Tele.)
Only one chance in this lifetime…
Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.
I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.
A student asked me to help her with an interview question. She asked for a good reply to: “What do you do if you’re given a project you don’t like?” I said this isn’t even a hypothetical, it will for sure happen. My answer was that, counterintuitively, you need to do the best work of your life on those projects. If you do bad work you doomloop your career— they will become worried about giving a more important project, you get stuck, you do more bad work, repeat. If they ask you to design a “blow dryer for a fish”, you need to design the best damn fish blow dryer the world has ever seen. Yes it will fail commercially, but then when you ask to help the “blow dryer for barbers” team, you have leverage to move over, and that team will be pulling you in.
I remember Portrait mode was running behind, and it risked not being in the keynote for iPhone 7 Plus. The quality wasn’t there. So the story of the second lens would have just been about zoom quality, rather than unlocking something profoundly new. It was Joz who, upon hearing this, sent an email to a few of us: “If I can give you until December what can you do?” With that additional time we were able to bring in a
machine learning block, and that was the big unlock for the quality improvements. The feature made the keynote and was released in October as a Beta. He fought every day for the purity of the ideas.
Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job.
There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making.
I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer.
So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life.
The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.
And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them.
- #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs
I got introduced to the Noon team through Soleio last year and decided to invest alongside him and a host of other great designers (@rsg @joulee).
The future of design is not about the ability to round trip into code and back; these are now one unified entity. We aren’t just stringing together static pages with transitions. That is done. In the future designs can’t be described without an interactive environment backed by code.
I’ve been doing software design for a long time and couldn’t be happier with where it’s going.
There is a longstanding idea in software: WYSIWYG
@noondesign is a canvas environment where humans and agents can create, edit, and ship product design. Its substrate is code. WYSIWYG.
The canvas affords us selection-based workflows and structure that text alone can’t match.