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Google Opal
- thisisauserid 10mo agoCute . I think we're all fine with anything that remotely threatens Vercel.
- ActionHank 10mo agoFirst thing I thought was “oh, neat, another google product they will kill”.
- willtemperley 10mo ago"Platform roulette" was my first thought. Then I realised the chance of winning on this gamble is approximately nil.
- dplgk 10mo agoOh neat, another service they will hold hostage if they arbitrarily decide to lock my Google account.
- LeoPanthera 10mo agoI didn't get far with this because it wants access to my entire Google Drive, which I declined. Credit to Google for even offering the chance to say "no", I suppose. Why does it need that?
- PaulDavisThe1st 10mo agoIt wants to add it to the training set ... (guess)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- TheDong 10mo agoSo you trust Google with the data in your google drive, but you don't trust Google (Opal Team) with the data in your drive? They need a place to store data, Google Drive is a place for that. Have you used NotebookLM or such which do the same sort of thing?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- tkamado 10mo agoSelect what Opal can access - "See and download all your Google Drive files."
- shwaj 10mo agoI tried de-selecting that, and it told me to re-login and enable that setting.
- onion2k 10mo agoSo you trust Google with the data in your google drive, but you don't trust Google (Opal Team) with the data in your drive? Yes. More specifically, I trust Google not to use my files to train its AI if I haven't given permission, but I don't trust Google not to use Opal as a way to get me to give them permission without realising.
- ryanjshaw 10mo agoHow do I even know this is a real Google product? Okay I’ll trust the domain (hopefully it’s not googIe.com). How do I know it has no vulnerabilities? Google is a massive company. There’s a big difference between trusting an established team vs. whoever this team is. Expecting permissions to my entire Google Drive is ridiculous. Yes, I tried not granting that permission (and only granting permission to an app-specific path) and it specifically told me I have to grant full permission . I closed the tab.
- TheLNL 10mo ago>How do I even know this is a real Google product? Okay I’ll trust the domain it is not even the expected opal.google.com it is opal.google, you need to be 100% sure beforehand that google has the sole rights to the .google tld (which an average person wouldn't know) The behavior also seems sketchy with it asking for permission but then rejecting any usage if all of the permissions are not approved (why even ask then, you are google) after re-finding the link through a confirmed subdomain.google.com site I tried to sign in and got this error ``` An unexpected signin error occured.Error checking geo access ``` so I gave up
- firesteelrain 10mo agoOpal isn’t just peeking at Drive, it’s using it as its backend. Outputs get saved as Drive files so they persist, can be shared, and open in Docs, etc The gotcha is the permission scope can be pretty broad (read/write or metadata across Drive), so it’s worth checking what you actually granted.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- glitchc 10mo agoThe Google drive is also hosted by Google on Google's servers. They already have access to everything in there.
- inkysigma 10mo agoI think the concern is that this might somehow enable a privacy policy they weren't aware of that permits training over the entire Drive. However, I think the primary reason for this is that these products generally would like to store data on the user's Google Drive but Google Drive doesn't have super granular permission structure to be able to set up a partitioned directory for the app alone. I actually think that might be a good thing to work on next?
- shwaj 10mo agoThat was my concern too. However, the provided links to both the ToS and privacy policy were the standard Google ones (https://policies.google.com/terms https://policies.google.com/terms), so it seems not to be giving Opal special privileges to read/train on Drive data.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- zja 10mo ago> Join our Discord for support and sharing feedback I’m surprised to see Google directing people to Discord, do they do that for other products?
- anonzzzies 10mo agoThey did for the new copilot agent builder products, thats where I get most early invites.
- dfajgljsldkjag 10mo agoThey had an invite only one in the bard days before it was rebranded to gemini. You didn't just need to get the invite link but actually link your discord to your google so I didn't bother. Just goes to show that google's attempts at chat have been a big flop and even though google chat exists they don't use it.
- esafak 10mo agoJules, their cloud AI agent.
- Jordan-117 10mo agoI recall them taking about one for NotebookLM.
- rolymath 10mo agoThey used to have a lot of IRC channels on freenode for Android.
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoProblem I see with this being "codeless" is now Google owns everything. They can just hold your app hostage at any price point.
- maxpert 10mo agoOne more Google product destined to die!
- colesantiago 10mo agoWhat is this AI mini app? Do this make an actual production Flutter app or something?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- esperent 10mo agoIt's basically an agent (Gem, as they call them) that you can run from your Gemini account.
- barrenko 10mo ago"The horror, the horror..."
- schappim 10mo agoDiscussion when launched 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44681786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44681786
- tomhow 10mo agoIt spent 6 minutes on the front page and 19 comments, which doesn't pass the "significant attention" threshold.
- kamranjon 10mo agoDoes it seem, I'm not sure, ironic maybe? That the main example here is "An app that writes blog posts" - "Researches a topic and writes a blog post about it" - that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results is now helping to destroy that very same thing they built their entire business on?
- dleeftink 10mo agoIf they store both the generated content and the eventual indexed location, they could now filter search results more comprehensively based on content hashes.
- luigi23 10mo agoI dont think so. They also triggered SEO race where businesses pump out same bland blogposts to optimize ranking. Content made by humans for those companies was the only viable way at that time, and now new synthetic method emerges - whatever generates revenue will win. AI reels and tiktoks get views, so why bother with human generated content after the training on models have been done? Sad but true.
- kamranjon 10mo agoThat's a good point, we had sort of the precursor to this already and yea likely driven by google themselves. It seems that every time incentives are aligned purely for profit we end up with situations like this where they inevitably run a good thing straight into the ground.
- dlillard0 10mo agoYeah, helping to produce AI-generated garbage.
- cdata 10mo agoArguably the ad business is to blame. It created a perverse incentive. They maximized pay-to-play. The losers were authors that previously published on a passion budget (and would/could never pay for ads). AI is just the last nail in the coffin.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo agoThe unresponsive search bar centred on the viewport is all I need to know about this product. Google may deliver us the AI future Altman promised. The PM who thinks animated PNGs pass for anything real is not on that path.
- binsquare 10mo agoI clicked the search bar thinking thats how i can try it. Turns out its just an animation and there’s a button underneath to actually try it.
- nimchimpsky 10mo ago[dead]
- agentifysh 10mo agoI think Google is going to do with consumer AI as they have done with search engine. Full monopolization. They own the lumberyard and the forest. They'll just see whats popular and then clone, launch and instantly own verticals. It's over for the little SaaS guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxFQYw_MmAA
- riffraff 10mo agoThey can't even monopolize the ai effort in their own org. There's a dozen google ai products that all compete with each other (ai studio, firebase studio, opal, Gemini etc). They have all the potential but have lost direction years ago. I think they will stay relevant but not dominant, much like the case of Google meet.
- w10-1 10mo ago> all compete with each other It's common business practice to set up internal innovation competitions, and blend the best.
- sabellito 10mo agoYou call all these products launches from google "internal innovation competitions"? And even if they were, which they aren't, are you sure it's a "common business practice"? How many companies can afford that.
- hopelite 10mo ago> lost direction years ago. I’ve never thought of Google as having some clear direction short of having dominated with the pagerank search. It reminds me of people who invented a thing that is ubiquitous and therefore just sits there printing money all their life, but basically every single other thing they’ve done since then has been at abysmal returns on capital (ie, where they would have been better off just not doing anything and putting it in the money market… their contribution was extremely negative), while they delude themselves into what wonderful success they’ve been because the one-shot invention keeps printing money. One exception might be YouTube, but if I recall the story correctly, Google was going to shut it down too when one guy (I don’t recall now) made a proposal and single-handedly turned it into the powerhouse it now is. But that’s just dumb luck on Google’s part. That guy could have also just as well have been somewhere else at that pivotal point and Google would have killed off YouTube like it has killed off so many other projects because it lacks the actual competence to follow through with things… everything always remains with a sense of being half-baked. That reminds me of a thing I stumbled upon a while ago now, that technically speaking several of Google’s core offerings are still designated as Beta projects behind the scenes. I’m not sure why exactly, but even if it’s just an oversight of background clutter, that seems symbolic of Google; the disheveled, disorganized, cluttered personality that has not resolved loose ends smothered in decades of other loose ends.
- sbalough 10mo agoAnyone have comments actually about Opal? Curious if anyone tried it.
- esperent 10mo agoIt showed up as "a new way to build Gems" on my Gemini account a couple of weeks ago. I tried it a couple of times but the basic idea I had of creating a top level agent with sub-agents depending on the query (supervisor pattern I think?) doesn't seem to work. There's no branching, it seemed to just run app possible paths at the same time which takes ages and wastes tokens. Maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe I misunderstood the purpose of this. But each thing I tried could be handled better by a normal gem with custom prompt. It might be useful for a specific kind is multi step non branching problem, but I didn't have any problems like that to test it with.
- scoopertrooper 10mo agoYeah the comments section is really disappointing here. Sadly, I can’t try it because it’s blocked in UK. I’ll try again over VPN later.
- mcintyre1994 10mo agoDo any of the example apps work for anyone? I tap “try now” on one, and it just opens a page with its logo/name/description. There’s a sidebar menu that just has its name, and a restart app button that does nothing. I can’t see how to make the app do anything.
- mark_l_watson 10mo agoI had to switch from Duck Duck Go browser to Safari, then the Book Recommendation app worked for me. For what its worth, the recommendations were good, evidenced by my having already read half the recommended books. The vibe promots to create this app were incredibly simple.
- apexalpha 10mo ago“Join our Discord…” That is a bit unexpected to see. Start Up vibes, haha. Looks like another insane leap forward this.
- jondwillis 10mo agoIn my estimation, that’s memetics and signaling to an in-group about who they want their audience to think their audience is. That’s why I did it. Oh, and it’s nice to be able to chat with potential users. By why not Slack or Teams?
- ghxst 10mo agoNot dismissing your first argument but we had good success hiring talent through Discord servers. If you want to reach the same audience that attends hackathons and such it's in my experience the best platform.
- mercacona 10mo agoDo you mean Discord is a kind of community for young hackers? I’m curious about Discord because I’ve been asked about a chat app for teenagers who don’t have mobile phones.
- jondwillis 10mo agoWell, Discord is from a gaming lineage. Definitely lots of script kiddies and pros alike hang out in various servers. It’s sort of like the forums of yesteryear, but more walled-garden, for better or worse. Probably goes without saying here, but gaming tends to be an on-ramp for getting young people into computers/tech/programming. I started reversing, hacking, and writing bots for old MMOs to try to avoid the grind. I ended up enjoying writing naughty code more than playing the games themselves. You don’t need a phone to use Discord AFAIK, but in my elderly imagination every teen is already on Discord.
- jondwillis 10mo agoYeah, I agree with that assessment too.
- joking 10mo agonot available in your country... I suppose for any in europe waking up like me that I can save you one click and some time.
- wojciii 10mo agoWhat is the usual life expectancy of a Google product? Google usually kills projects. What's the point in using this?
- BaudouinVH 10mo ago"not available in your country" (I'm in Belgium)
- pvtmert 10mo ago2 cents from me 1. "it's not available in your country yet" -- although I am currently in (and connected to) Czech republic train, my account is based on Luxembourg. Not sure which one takes precedence, but sad to see... 2. Join Discord -- Unexpected to see this from a Google product. More interestingly, do they really have people/staff there? Or is it just bunch of AI Agents running the discord server, not sure. (Haven't joined either)
- ghxst 10mo agoJust short of 300k members on discord (almost 17k online) at the time of writing this. It's their Google Labs discord.
- esperent 10mo agoIt's been available in Vietnam for around 2 weeks now. So maybe it's a privacy thing in the EU? Honestly though you're not missing much, it doesn't feel revolutionary. > Join Discord -- Unexpected to see this from a Google product I did a trial of Gemini Enterprise last month - a product absolutely not ready to be released - and they use Slack which also surprised me. So maybe internal teams at Google are allowed to choose their own messaging platform?
- pvtmert 10mo agoSlack is expected as Kubernetes/Cloud-Native/CNCF already used Slack. They also had extensive set of bots and integrations, including GitHub workflows too. TIL, Google Labs use discord :)
- wiether 10mo agoThe list of countries where its available is here: https://developers.google.com/opal/faq https://developers.google.com/opal/faq Not a single EU country, so, yes.
- pjmlp 10mo agoOpal is Optimizely AI name, but I guess Google's being Google, they are the ones that need to now change the product name. https://www.optimizely.com/ai/ https://www.optimizely.com/ai/
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 10mo agoThat will make 300 https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- kinlan 10mo agoHere's the OSS repo for Google Opal: https://github.com/breadboard-ai/breadboard https://github.com/breadboard-ai/breadboard
- ulrischa 10mo agoNot available in Germany and I assume the rest of Europe
- qweiopqweiop 10mo agoI wonder how android developers feel about this. You put years of your life into supporting a companies product, and then they actively try and remove the need for your job to exist.
- hu3 10mo agoif your app can be replaced by a few vibe prompts I doubt it was successful in the first place
- nimchimpsky 10mo ago[dead]
- croemer 10mo ago"Opal is not available in your country yet" Thanks for having me click through 5 screens including giving access to Google Drive to tell me that in the end.
- realharo 10mo agoIsn't this the same thing they showcased as part of the Gemini 3 Flash release some time ago? On https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-flash/ , the paragraph that starts with: "Or you can quickly build fun, useful apps from scratch using your voice without prior coding knowledge."
- htrp 10mo agodifferent team?
- mellosouls 10mo agoYeah me too. 6 months after original launch! What a crappy product experience, who's managing this rubbish?
- tessierashpool9 10mo ago"An app that writes blog posts" ... how about an app that reads blog posts? ^^
- vedmakk 10mo agoReminds me of a quote from a few years back: "We are entering an era where we use AI to write blog posts from a few keywords for people who use AI to summarize a blog post into a few keywords".
- ramon156 10mo ago> Not available in your country yet See ya in 6 months !
- xtracto 10mo agoSee them in the Google Graveyard most likely. This is one of those G experiments for which I wouldn't invest 5 minutes of my time building something, knowing it will surely be "sunsetted" in a short time.
- mrtksn 10mo agoFunny, everyone is trying to do the same thing. IMHO no one nailed it yet.
- vivzkestrel 10mo agothat is because they are all using non deterministic approaches, aka expecting that a single detailed prompt with 10000 words is going to generate a stable application. Because prompts dont have replay value, you have to split it into one microtask per agent and validate the output with deterministic fallback as and when required.
- jdthedisciple 10mo agoMaybe it's just me, but it doesn't inspire anything in me. This idea of make-things-quick-without-any-real-skills seems fundamentally contrary to achieving lasting quality...
- derrida 10mo agoThis line of thought does not apply to the tortilla, the roti and the naan. YMMV
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- binary132 10mo agoThese companies won’t rest until they’ve figured out how to get rid of all their actual employees and have replaced their business strategy with “just click YES on whatever the slop machine cranks out this quarter”
- thiht 10mo agoIs "an app to write blog posts" the best example they could find? What’s even the point, who will even read AI slop blog posts? If they can’t even come up with a good, useful idea to showcase their product, I can’t believe it’s worth it to begin with.
- josefritzishere 10mo agoAnyone taking bets on when this shows up on killedbygoogle.com ?
- robertheadley 10mo agoGoogle died when they removed "Do not be evil" from their mission statement and removed 20% time.
- amadeuspagel 10mo agoDid they generate the example prompts with AI too?
- admin135 10mo agoHello
- admin135 10mo agoHow to fuck you