Google Opal

36 points | by gmays 2 hours ago

19 comments

  • schappim 17 minutes ago

    Discussion when launched 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44681786

  • zja 14 minutes 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?

      dfajgljsldkjag 10 minutes ago

      They 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.

      Jordan-117 3 minutes ago

      I recall them taking about one for NotebookLM.

      anonzzzies 11 minutes ago

      They did for the new copilot agent builder products, thats where I get most early invites.

      esafak 6 minutes ago

      Jules, their cloud AI agent.

  • colesantiago 22 minutes ago

    What is this AI mini app?

    Do this make an actual production Flutter app or something?

  • ActionHank 27 minutes ago

    First thing I thought was “oh, neat, another google product they will kill”.

      willtemperley 8 minutes ago

      "Platform roulette" was my first thought. Then I realised the chance of winning on this gamble is approximately nil.

  • maxpert 26 minutes ago

    One more Google product destined to die!

  • thisisauserid an hour ago

    Cute . I think we're all fine with anything that remotely threatens Vercel.

  • barrenko 21 minutes ago

    "The horror, the horror..."

  • giancarlostoro 29 minutes ago

    Problem I see with this being "codeless" is now Google owns everything. They can just hold your app hostage at any price point.

  • LeoPanthera 32 minutes ago

    I 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?

      firesteelrain 10 minutes ago

      Opal 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.

      TheDong 11 minutes ago

      So 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?

      glitchc 6 minutes ago

      The Google drive is also hosted by Google on Google's servers. They already have access to everything in there.

        inkysigma 3 minutes ago

        I 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?

      PaulDavisThe1st 29 minutes ago

      It wants to add it to the training set ... (guess)