Google has just announced a new product called Disco.
Now, this is kind of like a crazy concept to me when I was thinking about it.
And the first thing I'll go over examples and how this works.
But the first thing I want to bring up here is I'm actually really excited.
I feel like Google has finally gotten their mojo back.
They definitely were caught slacking when chat GPT dropped.
It felt like they were getting behind.
They weren't.
It didn't feel like they were quite up to par with a lot of the other AI innovation that was coming out.
It felt like they had stifled AI because they were worried about their ads business for a long time.
And all of a sudden, it feels like they finally seized their moment.
They're coming up with all these really crazy products.
I love the fact that they are taking big shots right now, big swings on a ton of random stuff.
It feels like they're basically throwing everything they can at the wall.
Seeing what sticks, seeing what people likes.
It feels a lot more like a you know, like a startup where they're trying a lot of different things.
They're okay if things fail.
This is like one of those instances where I'm like curious to see if this is going to be popular, if it's going to fail.
But you've seen them do this with a lot of different products.
Some of them we don't hear much about anymore, but some things like Notebook LM seem to be, you know, really popular and you keep hearing about them into the future.
So I feel like this quote unquote disco product is one of those. essentially how this works is I'll give you an example so like you might be studying for a test or something or you might be studying a specific topic and this quote-unquote gen tabs thing is going to all of a sudden have a pop-up that suggests you build a web app to visualize the information that you're studying so you might be studying like I don't know the solar system all the planets might have a pop-up that says you have a demo on one of their sites where it's like you know, like make a 3D model rendering of the whole solar system so you can like scroll around and look at what the solar system and the spacing of all the planets is in, you know, real life or whatever.
So like, it's a cool concept.
To me, it just sounds like absolutely insane.
But I think that we, because it seems like wow, that's so much compute, that's so much work, just for, like you know, I want to like maybe visualize something, but like, did no one else build this entire, you know, 3D model?
Am I the first one to do this?
Do we need to have like 10,000 people building a 3D model of a solar system to look at?
I want to really reuse the code.
It feels like weirdly wasteful.
And I know that to me and I know this is probably coming from my background, which is in, you know, I've been working on software products for the last number of years.
And for so long before AI came around, we were just doing it from scratch.
This was in, you know, it took a very long time.
These tools were like resources.
They cost a lot of money to build.
And all of a sudden we could just do them at the snap of a finger.
And it's like you it's like single use plastic.
It feels like you make it and you throw it away.
So anyways, I think it's just like such a fascinating concept.
But I think it is the future of where we go with this, because essentially this code has become commoditized.
These models are so good at writing code that you can build any tool that you want very quickly.
So why not build it?
I guess another example of this.
If you're trying to do something less academic, um the over on tech crunch, they have some examples which, to be honest, I don't love these examples because I feel like they're so overused, but they recommend it.
If you're trying to build like a meal plan, you had a whole bunch of tabs open of like recipes.
It could all of a sudden make like uh, like a, literally like an app, that is, software that has all of your meal plans and all of your recipes like built into it.
And you can click through them all.
Like And then I guess you could save this and come back to this like app that you have built.
I don't really know how useful that is.
I mean it's like conceptually.
I'm looking at like a visualization of what this tool would look like.
It looks really cool like this meal planner thing, but I just don't know how useful that workflow actually is.
Here's another interesting one that I saw Google themselves on their like big blog post.
They put out about disco.
They put out like an example video of someone using this.
So essentially in the example, the person is trying to take a road trip and they want to.
They're saying like look, I'm taking a road trip from Boston next month.
I want to do sledding and some other things.
Can you help me plan?
And this is something that you could definitely ask an AI model.
So that's nothing like new or revolutionary.
And it's like basically Gemini that just goes through and gives them some ideas of like things that they can do.
They then follow up and they're like you know I'm interested in, you know, local markets and some festive things to do in those cities.
And it shows them some of those things.
And then comes the pop up which is it says you know, I could help you create an interactive app to help you explore some of your options.
And you click on this button, which says create gem or gen tab.
All of a sudden, It goes through just like all the vibe coding apps that I'm super familiar with.
I think a lot of people have been playing around with.
And it creates this whole app, which is basically like a Google Maps overlay.
And then there's all of these filter buttons where there's like activity.
There's a calendar where you can select what days you're going there.
There's like these little bubbles all over the map of where each activity is, with a custom icon for it.
And you can scroll through like all these filters at the top.
Like it's this really cool custom map, right?
You can imagine someone could have spent a lot of time programming, developing this thing and put it on a website for you know.
Specific like travel planning uses.
And then it's cool because you can actually edit the code directly from the chat thing.
They're just like, okay, cool.
Now on the calendar, put what the weather is.
And there's like all of a sudden, icons pop up on each day of the calendar, whether it's going to be like sunny or snowy and whatever.
All of that's there.
It's like it's so fascinating because someone is literally developing this tool.
They can like click on all the little buttons with all the activities and there's a pop up with a link to the website and like a picture and what the activities rated on, like Google, My Business or whatever.
So anyways, it seems like just a very interesting world to me, where essentially we're able to just create apps and products and tools right off the bat for a single use.
You know, my brain is still kind of stuck on.
I have like workflows that I want to automate, and it makes perfect sense for me to make you know automations for that, or even ones that you might want to share with your friends, if you plan on doing something over and over again.
But creating an app for a single-use activity is kind of a new concept.
So I think this is what Google's going for.
They say, take the web for a fresh spin.
That's kind of their slogan on this new disco tool.
Okay, so overall, I think this is interesting, but it's not available to everyone.
You have to join a waitlist if you want to download the app to start using it.
It is only for Mac OS, so it's like its own standalone app, sort of like Google Chrome.
Now what I think might be happening here, because this whole thing is getting promoted on the Google Chrome YouTube channel, so this feels like it is being promoted by the Google Chrome.
It's becoming its own browser extension.
But what's interesting is it feels like they're not taking Google Chrome and turning it into its own head-on-head competitor with OpenAI's Atlas AI browser or Perplexity's Comet AI browser.
It feels like they're making a brand new thing, this disco, right?
This AI kind of enabled tool.
And I think Google didn't want to just do what everyone else was doing, which is basically build an agent into the browser or perhaps they'll do that with Google Chrome.
They wanted to make a brand new product.
So this literally is for like creating apps, which Gemini is very capable of doing, from your browsing experience.
To me it's interesting that this isn't a plugin, perhaps on Chrome, or maybe even just a feature baked in, that they're doing this completely separate.
Perhaps they're worried that people will hate it or it'll be way too compute intensive I think is probably the bigger and so that people wouldn't want to have that on by default.
But in any case, this is an interesting way that Google's rolling things out.
They're making an entirely new product, seeing if it can stand on its own.
There's also.
I know I've heard some rumors from people, but I don't actually think there's too much to it.
But they're saying, you know, because of the department of you know the lawsuit essentially the antitrust lawsuit against Google, where they were saying like oh, Google's going to have to spin out the Chrome browser and sell it to someone else or spin it out as a separate company.
You would also imagine that Google wouldn't want to put too much you know all of their eggs into one basket.
They could make this new AI browser Disco, and then if, for some reason which I don't think it'll happen, but if for some reason this lawsuit actually goes through, which would be bad news for them, and Chrome had to get sold or sent out to another company, they could still keep this new browser and be like well okay, we sent off our big browser or whatever, but we have this new shiny browser called Disco and you can do all this cool stuff with it, and it's completely separate.
And so...
It's kind of interesting because it feels like even if Google was threatened with one of their core business you know, pieces of their business or software of their business, they could right now, because of AI, like reinventing basically every piece of software that exists.
They could just have an AI version, like their new AI, enabled whatever browser, and that they could default have installed on all the Android devices.
So they still have great distribution for it.
And the Chrome browser can go sail off into the sunset under new management.
Now, I don't think that's going to happen.
I think they'll be able to keep Google Chrome.
But I think this is kind of a sneaky backup plan to make a completely new product in the case that that happens.
And of course, it is an interesting use case.
So thanks so much for tuning into the podcast today.
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