Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on matters starting from a London cholera outbreak to the worth of video video games. He’s been a tv presenter and a podcast host. He’s a keynote speaker who doesn’t must name himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a 12 months now, he’s been a full-time worker of Google, a standing that’s clear when he badges me into the search big’s Chelsea places of work in New York to indicate me what his workforce has been creating.
It’s known as NotebookLM, and the best approach to consider it’s as an AI collaborator with entry to all of your supplies that sits in your metaphorical shoulder to information you thru your undertaking. NotebookLM was soft-launched to a choose group earlier this 12 months however is now obtainable to all as an “experiment”—that’s Google’s low-risk option to see how the app behaves and the way we behave with the app.
Johnson discovered his option to Google by the use of a lifelong obsession with software program as a “a dynamic thought accomplice,” a device to hurry up and improve the inventive course of. When he was in faculty he grew to become obsessive about HyperCard, Apple’s software program that broke data into chunks and allowed you to navigate an information-space by way of hyperlinks. It anticipated net navigation earlier than the online existed. “I fought mightily to show HyperCard into that dream device, nevertheless it wasn’t fairly prepared,” he says. He ultimately grew to become an fanatic of Scrivener, a mixture phrase processor and undertaking organizer standard with ebook authors. (I’m a fan too.)
When Johnson obtained entry to OpenAI’s GPT-3 textual content generator in 2021, he acknowledged that AI might degree up a brand new technology of thought instruments. Oh, wait, he mentioned to himself, this factor that has at all times been behind my thoughts is now going to be doable. Situations unthinkable even a 12 months earlier than had been all of the sudden on the desk. Johnson didn’t but know that Google not solely had comparable massive language fashions, however was already engaged on a undertaking very a lot in keeping with his considering. In Could 2022, a small workforce within the experimental Google Labs division cold-emailed Johnson. They arrange a gathering by way of Starline, a Google Labs undertaking that permits for eerily intimate in-person conferences. “I principally had a dialog with a hologram who mentioned, ‘You already know, this factor you’ve got been chasing your complete life? We will lastly construct it,’” Johnson says. He grew to become a part-time adviser to the small workforce, at first sharing the workflow of an expert author. “This is 4 or 5 engineers, this is an precise writer, let’s simply watch him,” is how Google Labs head Josh Woodward sums up the method. Ultimately Johnson obtained concerned within the growth of the product itself and was sucked in to the purpose of accepting a full-time gig. His title at Google Labs is editorial director.
NotebookLM, initially known as Venture Tailwind, begins by creating an information set of your supply materials, which you drag into the device from Google Docs or the clipboard. After the app has digested all of it, you possibly can then ask NotebookLM questions on your materials, because of Google’s massive language mannequin expertise—partly powered by its just-released improve Gemini. The solutions mirror not solely what’s in your supply materials but additionally the broader common understanding of the world that Gemini has. A crucial function is that each reply to your queries comes with a set of citations reporting the place precisely the data got here from, so customers can verify the accuracy of its output.
Google is just not the one firm envisioning merchandise that allow individuals create customized information units to discover with LLMs. At OpenAI’s developer day final month, the corporate launched customized mini-GPTs that may be tuned to a selected process. Woodward acknowledges a “core similarity.” However he argues that NotebookLM focuses extra on enhancing a workflow, and is geared to supply superior accuracy in its outputs. Additionally, he says that the OpenAI merchandise have extra of a character, whereas NotebookLM is designed to don’t have any such pretensions.
