Expanding access to Opal, our no-code AI mini-app builder

https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/opal-expansion/

by simonpure • 10 months ago

40 26 10 months ago

blog.google

DataDaemon• 10 months ago

living in the EU feels like living in the Stone Age

sjbr• 10 months ago

At least you are getting chat control.

dmitrygr2• 10 months ago

Nobody in the stone age voted to live in the stone age, ignoring all warnings that their vote would produce a stone age.

simonjgreen• 10 months ago

Or like there is an expectation companies will treat your information with respect and act with integrity. It is unfortunate that that causes companies to have to think for longer about how they will act before they do.

nicce• 10 months ago

OpenAI tried without real regulation and we see how that turned out.

dmitrygr2• 10 months ago

It is unfortunate that that causes companies to have to think for longer

It is basic market dynamics that the harder you make it to enter a market, the more reluctant entrants will be. Whether the regulation that makes market entry more difficult is "good" or "bad" is simply irrelevant.

yanosc• 10 months ago

If you think a node-based editor makes a society modern, you have no idea what you are talking about, and you are foolish enough to believe this is what progress looks like. Not to discredit OAI, but you are just a victim of their marketing, chasing the next thing, which is merely an illusion of innovation, and it works because it fills your lack of true belonging. Do as you wish, you are a free consumer after all, but don’t go on the internet and discredit other people, their work and contribution, just because you’re are pathetic bystander yourself.

gundmc• 10 months ago

Seems like cool framework, but I'm bothered by the example image around having AI research and generate a blog post. This is exactly the sort of thing I don't want.

barbazoo• 10 months ago

[flagged]

dang• 10 months ago

Most of us probably agree, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ngruhn2• 10 months ago

Name one successful no-code solution. Not snark. I'm serious. Give me examples. In my experience, these no-code tools either die being too simple or live long enough to be patched into fully fledged visual programming languages. At which point the promised simplicity is gone. Idk, maybe with AI it's different.

mjr00• 10 months ago

Really depends on the scope of the solution; a lot of web development has gone no-code through the use of frameworks and platforms like Wix, Unbounce, Squarespace, Shopify, Gumroad, etc. Like it's crazy to think, but 15 years ago if you were a person with a single widget you wanted to sell over the internet (even a digital widget with no shipping logistics!) it was a big hassle that involved a lot of programming and hooking up various APIs. Now you can get a full e-commerce site with analytics and payments integrated fairly easily with basically no technical knowledge.

The counter-argument is that these tools are too narrowly scoped, but I think that's exactly what made them successful; their "no-code" tools provided a solution for a common problem.

Ultimately I agree with what you're getting at. There's never been a successful no-code, or even low-code, replacement for general purpose programming, and there never will be.

ngruhn2• 10 months ago

Fair enough. Those website builders have their place. I'm rather thinking of something like NodeRed where you specify control flow. But with boxes and arrows instead of code. Which is also what this Google product seems to do.

blast• 10 months ago

Replit

holografix2• 10 months ago

Unreal Engine’s Blueprints

shmoogy• 10 months ago

Node Red, N8N, and Zapier I think are the biggest ones. I think the cool idea of AI implemented no code is, in theory, you can add a new node - tell the AI what to do, and it can build custom logic to do whatever it is that you want with the input.

Thats probably verging on too high of a complexity for end users, but if you can obfuscate the black box and have it work well enough, it can definitely be big.

LudwigNagasena• 10 months ago

Visual graph languages are in some ways even superior to code because it’s really hard to express a state machine in an easily readable fashion with code.

jasonjmcghee• 10 months ago

Substance Designer / Painter, Blender Nodes, TouchDesigner, DaVinci Resolve Fusion, etc.

That whole space is full of node-based tools that people build careers on.

Onavo• 10 months ago

What happened to Microsoft's low code AI builder?

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/microsoft-acquires-lobe-a-...

holografix2• 10 months ago

What about jules.google.com ? Are these competing products?

danpalmer• 10 months ago

This is a no-code app building framework, Jules is a coding agent that will write whatever you ask it to, so, no. You could use them to achieve the same result, but they are for very different purposes and target audiences.

nextworddev• 10 months ago

This was a garbage product compared to n8n

usrxcghghj• 10 months ago

google as a product company is pretty lame these days. its too bad because i know without a doubt some incredibly talent and intelligent people work there. But maybe in the past 10 years? or so. LAME

cadamsdotcom• 10 months ago

Whatever this product is, it shows what an org can achieve when staff care only about promotions.

Can't fault Google employees - the software retirement village is comfy.

But it's a big opportunity cost for society.

puppycodes2• 10 months ago

The example they show... generating a garbage AI generated blog.

puppycodes2• 10 months ago

I can smell its sunset already.

Expanding access to Opal, our no-code AI mini-app builder

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