Just over two years ago, I landed the first commit in a fresh Github repo and started the Breadboard project. The innocuous “Here is a graph” title of that commit already pointed to where I wanted to go – a graph-based system for composing what I later named “AI patterns” and even later, “Recipes for Thought”.
When Opal launched on July 24, folks familiar with Breadboard must have done a double-take: the familiar user interface of Breadboard was strongly hinting at Opal’s open source heritage.
Yup. Opal is built with Breadboard. It follows a common pattern in open source software, where the project is open source, but the product that’s built on it is not.
I learned this pattern when I was working on the Chrome team at Google – now a long time ago. Though free, Chrome was (and still is) commercial software, with all the care and diligence that goes into shipping it. At the same time, most of that browser’s code was (and still is) open source: not only could you see it all, you could (and many did) contribute to it, just like in a typical open source project. Even though I worked at Google, all of my work was out in the open. I worked on the Chromium project – and that project was the backbone of the product called “Chrome”.
This interesting project/product relationship is somewhat unique to the open source world. Most non-open source projects don’t have to draw that line, and it’s mostly blurred or entirely invisible. There, the project is roughly equivalent to the product.
In an open source project, the line is much more crisp, and becomes significant. The project becomes its own thing, with a community around it, and even other ways in which the source code of the project is used. Many modern browsers trace their heritage back to Chromium. Node.Js was built on V8, the JavaScript engine that Chromium introduced. The ever-popular VS Code is built on Electron, which is a fork of Chromium. A healthy open source project is a product in itself, with its own audience, its own niche, and its own set of product market fit challenges. A healthy open source project has a whole ecosystem around it.
Breadboard and Opal follow the same pattern. Breadboard is the open source project where all of Opal’s code lives. Opal is the product that we ship at Labs. Just like Chrome, we take the Breadboard code, apply a bit of configuration, and then serve it from opal.withgoogle.com.
This setup allows us to expand the potential impact of Opal. I started the Breadboard project because I believed (and still do!) that more people having access to tools to compose LLMs into something interesting would allow us to better understand the full potential of the current generation of what we call “artificial intelligence” and move beyond the hype – beyond anxious anticipation of what LLM – and be more empowered to make sense of them.