Different teams. This AI team at Google cares not for the health of the web. They barely remember that Google has a search engine, except of course for the groudbreaking AI search results which are responsible for many large numbers for use in annual reviews. This team's goal is to sell their AI solution, and if that means demonstrating its ability to generate tools that create crap content that harms the search engine results, well, I'm sure another AI solution can probably combat that later.

Arguably 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.

I 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.

Google has already been single-handedly destroying the internet for over a decade by turning into an ad-ridden mess

> that the company who helped champion the network effects of the internet and surface truly useful search results...

The amount of data on the web crossed the threshold of organic discoverability some time before the AI boom started. AI makes it go from really bad to really, really bad (99% to 99.99%). As far as I am concerned it doesn't change anything.

The same mechanisms to find good content would work today as well - following humans and networks.

If they store both the generated content and the eventual indexed location, they could now filter search results more comprehensively based on content hashes.

Yeah, helping to produce AI-generated garbage.

Isn'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/ , the paragraph that starts with:

"Or you can quickly build fun, useful apps from scratch using your voice without prior coding knowledge."

Yeah me too. 6 months after original launch! What a crappy product experience, who's managing this rubbish?

They 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.

I doubt that, I hear on the internet that Gemini pro is great but every time I have used it has been beyond disappointing. I’m starting to believe that the Gemini pro is great is some paid PR push and not based on reality. The Gemma models are also probably the least useful/interesting local models I’ve used.

It spent 6 minutes on the front page and 19 comments, which doesn't pass the "significant attention" threshold.

I 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.

The list of countries where its available is here: https://developers.google.com/opal/faq

Not a single EU country, so, yes.

It'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?

Just short of 300k members on discord (almost 17k online) at the time of writing this. It's their Google Labs discord.

It 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.

Yeah 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.

This line of thought does not apply to the tortilla, the roti and the naan.

YMMV

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.

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?

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

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

In 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?

They've used discord for a while for things like GSoC but in general it's becoming more widespread seeing that even Copilot has a Microsoft owned discord server, Valdi from Snapchat as well.

I 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.

Reminds 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".

if your app can be replaced by a few vibe prompts I doubt it was successful in the first place

It's basically an agent (Gem, as they call them) that you can run from your Gemini account.

that 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.

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.

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

They used to have a lot of IRC channels on freenode for Android.

I recall them taking about one for NotebookLM.

Jules, their cloud AI agent.

See 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.

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

Oh neat, another service they will hold hostage if they arbitrarily decide to lock my Google account.