nickcassimatis

Thanks for the pointers. The pricing is free for now. In the future we’re guessing it will be a typical freemium pricing model. There is also a totally self-hosted version that people can license.

I'd be happy to hear more about these use cases you have in mind, either here or over email.

It's a reasonable concern.

Many apps we won't be able to handle at first can easily be handled by our approach with more work.

For some capabilities, we will have ways of filling gaps in the platform. We have some easy-to-use and fairly flexible hooks where you can add a lot of UI customization. We've also discussed mechanisms for catching events in dry and triggering external code developers can write. But that's almost certainly not going to make v1.

Like Access, we do aim to make development much easier, and in-house tools are an obvious first market. However, there are a lot of aspects of Dry (involving access permission, data tagging, moderation, and more) that aren't all together in any other platform. These make it easier to build social, collaborative, and messaging apps much more easily than other approaches.

You actually do not have to understand the software underneath. The point is for that to be invisible to the developer.

We'll probably be posting a technical whitepaper and/or more technically-oriented video to the website soon.

I was the founder of SkyPhrase, a natural language processing startup that Yahoo acquired in 2013. Natural language was also a focus of my AI research. We have some ideas on how to apply that to this project, but they will probably have to wait at least a few months.

This isn't a snarky response, but a sincere question: how would you have titled the article or expressed our mission? It's difficult to come up with something that's clear and captures our intent while also fitting into a single sentence. We'll take any help on that we can get.

Yes, in a sense, all computing is AI. Alan Turing was explicit in his writings that he was trying to create machine intelligence and that he saw Turing Machines as a formalization of behavior he attributed to intelligence.

Thanks for the curiosity.

To do some advanced customization of how an app looks would require some javascript, but if they are happy with the UI we provide by default, then they could build some nontrivial stuff.

Our approach is very model-driven. Three differences/innovations with respect to that work are that 1. the models we use have a few additional elements that lead to a much wider range of apps that can be created, 2. we have a way of overriding what's generated from the model by default and 3., the software behavior we generate from the model includes more elements of the conventional modern software stack (search, authentication, sharing, etc.)

But I understand your reaction. I personally love AI and started working on it during the "AI winter" when everyone told me it was career suicide. I've been to AI conference where the keynote was on ordinary A/B testing, which Sir Francis Bacon invented ~400 years ago. Web developers have been using that for almost two decades, but it was presented as a new kind of AI magic just last year at a conference.