Google Opal [experiment] - not in the UK yet

Well, this is a turn up for the books and something long overdue for the general public:

find out more here: https://opal.withgoogle.com/landing/

Now, you could just go off and do some gold-rush effort and I highly encourage you to do so - THIS is a game-changer.  It really is.

As this is "my universe", I'm just going to pull it back to me (yes, very narcissistic, I know, but I don't care).  Here are a couple of articles that I just want to call attention to:

https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2020/02/a-week-off-worksort-ofproject-o.html

https://tonyisageek.blogspot.com/2020/12/project-o-my-machine-programming-project.html

The basic premise was to use NLP (natural language processing) where you, as a non-technical person, could describe what you want an application to be and do.  Then, through the power of automation it would generate a starter-for-10 application from templated code and deploy it onto a Cloud environment, so that you could then see it / touch it / run it.  If it was good enough, just use it as-is, but also provide the ability to enhance and extend it.

Now, back in 2017 (8 years ago!!!) this was a pipe-dream for a lot of people and they mocked me, told me I had my head in the clouds.  I actually made a working prototype using IBM products, it was crude, but it showed the level of innovation that was needed to spark that next generation thinking.

Fast forward to today and guess what.  Yep, it's here.  Was I involved? nope. Maybe I just tapped into the "ideas ether" frequency at that time - now, if I'd not put the focus onto trying to convince IBM execs to back the idea and just went out to VCs / investors, I could have built out the idea and made the solution a lot earlier

The bit I find more amusing.  I clearly named the idea as "Project O" - as you can see, Google has named their experiment "Google Opal".  cough cough cough. coincidence? sure. but, still :-D 

anyway, just wanted to show that I was pioneering this approach to etchnology and building out potential solutions for it, way back, I was still "blue washed" and still believed that I was doing the right thing with IBM, who were meant to be innovative, however, I've learnt my lesson, I should have just made the JUMP sooner and believed in myself more.  I will the next time ;-)

Right, so WHAT is Google Opal then? why can't we just use LLMs, chatGPT, AI Agents, n8n, other tools? surely they all do this sort of thing?  Well, yes, but not as slick and well as this!

A very quick intro is this YouTube video:

https://evolutionaihub.com/how-to-use-google-opal-build-free-ai-apps/

Sound familiar?

And here's the OFFICIAL video:

What are the KEY BENEFITS of using a tool like this? let me show you from the URL link earlier, that you didn't click on - now the amusing thing is, you can use Opal to go and get that auto summary from a web-page just by sharing the URL and asking it to do the "Prompt" thing that people have burnt a lot of time and effort "getting right" the past year or two:

Bullet point 4 is the main push for companies - reduced time to deliver something.  Even if it is just a crude PoC, it's enough to explain and show an idea - rather than 1000s of pages of dry paperwork explaining a solution, you can touch and feel something really quickly.

I'll say it again - those benefits are REALLY familiar :-D

Okay, so enough teasing - you want to have a workable example?. sure, let's do this.

Well.....this kind of pi$$es on your strawberries a bit if you are in the UK:

Well, I suppose we can just imagine what it is like for a bit longer.  sigh.  I am sure it will appear pretty quick though.  This might be the time to invest in ProtonVPN lol

I'll keep tabs on this and when it DOES become available in the UK, trust me - I'll be one of the first users putting it through it's paces to see what it can do for me and ultimately what it can do for other people and how we can all benefit from using this technology in this way.