Google has just announced a new product called Disco. This is essentially a Gemini powered tool. It's going to work inside of the browser. And it is for making web apps, like apps, from browser tabs, things that you're doing.
They want to turn a task on. You're doing into an app. 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 didn't feel like they were quite up to par with a lot of the other AI innovations coming out. It felt like they had stifled AI because they were just business for a long time. And all of a sudden, it feels like they finally seize their moment. They're coming up with all these really crazy products.
I love the fact that they're 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 like. It feels a lot more like a startup where there's trying a lot of different things. They're OK if things fail.
This is one of those instances where I'm 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 you don't hear much about anymore. But some things like Notebook LM seem to be 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 you might be studying for a test or something or you might be studying a specific topic. And this quote-unquote gen tab 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 the solar system on the planet. So I have a pop-up that says you have a demo on one of their sites where it's like make a 3D model rendering up the whole solar system so you can scroll around and look at the solar system and the space in all the planets in real life or whatever. So it's a cool concept. To me, it just sounds absolutely insane.
But I think that it seems like, wow, that's so much compute. That's so much work just for like, I want to maybe visualize something but did no one else build this entire 3D model. Am I the first one to do this? Do we need to have like 10,000 people building a 3D model of solar system to look at?
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, 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, 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 sample of a finger.
And it's like single use plastic. And it's 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 AM 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, the over on TechCrunch to 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 a meal plan, you have a whole bunch of tabs open up recipes.
You could all of a sudden make like a literally like an app that is software that has all of your meal plans and all of your recipes built into it and you can click through them all. And then I guess you could save this and come back to this app that you have built. I don't really know how useful that is. I mean, conceptually, I'm looking at a visualization about this tool.
It looks 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 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, I'm taking a road trip from Boston next month.
I want to do study on 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 a revolutionary.
And it's basically Gemini that just goes through and gives them some ideas of things that they can do. They then follow up and they're like, I'm interested in 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, I could help you create an interactive app to help you explore some of your options.
And you click on this button, which says, Gen tab all of a sudden it goes through just 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 a Google Maps overlay. And then there's all of these filter buttons where there's activity.
There's a calendar where you can select what days you're going there. There's these little bubbles all over the map of where each activity is with a custom icon for it. And you can scroll through all these filters at the top. 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 specific travel planning uses. And then it's cool because you can actually edit the code directly from the chat thing. They're just like, OK, cool. Now on the calendar, put what the weather is.
And there's all of the icons pop up on each day of the calendar, whether it's going to be sunny or snowy and all of that. It's there. It's like, it's so fascinating because someone's literally developing this tool. They can click on all the little buttons with all the activities.
And there's a pop up to link to the website and a picture and what the activities rated on 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 of that for a single use. My brain is still stuck on. I have workflows that I want to automate.
And it makes perfect sense for me to make 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. OK. So overall, I think this is interesting.
But it's not available to everyone. You have to join a wait list 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 opening eyes Atlas, AI browser, or Perplexes, comma 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 whatever else was doing, which is basically build an agent into the browser or perhaps do that with Google Chrome. They wanted to make a brand new product.
So this literally is for creating apps, which demonize very capable of doing from your browsing experience. To me, it's interesting that this isn't a plug-in, 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 it's probably the bigger thing, 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. I've heard some rumors from people, but I don't actually think there's too much to it. But they're saying, because of the Department of the lawsuit, essentially the antitrust lawsuit against Google, where they were saying, 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 all of their eggs into one basket.
They could make this new AI browser disco, and then for some reason, which I don't think it'll happen, but 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, OK, we sent off our big browser, whatever. But we have this new shiny browser called disco, and you can do all this cool stuff with it.
It's kind of interesting because it feels like even if Google was threatened with one of their core pieces of their business or software of their business, they could, right now, because of AI reinventing basically every piece of software that exists, they could just have an AI version, like their new AI enabled, whatever browser that they could default, have installed on all the Android devices, they still have great distribution for it. And the Chrome browser can go sail off into the sense of under new management. Now, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it'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. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts.
And also make sure to go check out AIbox.ai. If you want to test all the different AI models in the world, including Gemini and all the different models I talk about on the show in one place for $20 a month without having to pay subscriptions to all the different platforms, Google, Gemini, Cloud, OpenAI, 11 Labs for audio, a bunch of cool image models. It's all on AIbox.ai. Thanks so much.
And I'll catch you next time.