Steven Johnson has written 13 books, on subjects 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 should name himself that in his LinkedIn profile. And for over a yr 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 staff has been creating.
It’s referred to as NotebookLM, and the simplest approach to think about it’s as an AI collaborator with entry to all of your supplies that sits in your metaphorical shoulder to information you thru your mission. NotebookLM was soft-launched to a choose group earlier this yr however is now obtainable to all as an “experiment”—that’s Google’s low-risk method to see how the app behaves and the way we behave with the app.
Johnson discovered his method to Google by means of a lifelong obsession with software program as a “a dynamic thought accomplice,” a software to hurry up and improve the artistic course of. When he was in faculty he turned obsessive about HyperCard, Apple’s software program that broke information into chunks and allowed you to navigate an information-space via hyperlinks. It anticipated net navigation earlier than the net existed. “I fought mightily to show HyperCard into that dream software, but it surely wasn’t fairly prepared,” he says. He ultimately turned an fanatic of Scrivener, a mixture phrase processor and mission organizer standard with e-book authors. (I’m a fan too.)
When Johnson bought entry to OpenAI’s GPT-3 textual content generator in 2021, he acknowledged that AI might stage up a brand new technology of thought instruments. Oh, wait, he stated to himself, this factor that has all the time been behind my thoughts is now going to be attainable. Eventualities unthinkable even a yr earlier than have been all of the sudden on the desk. Johnson didn’t but know that Google not solely had related giant language fashions, however was already engaged on a mission very a lot in step with his pondering. In Might 2022, a small staff within the experimental Google Labs division cold-emailed Johnson. They arrange a gathering by way of Starline, a Google Labs mission that permits for eerily intimate in-person conferences. “I mainly had a dialog with a hologram who stated, ‘You already know, this factor you have been chasing your entire life? We will lastly construct it,’” Johnson says. He turned a part-time adviser to the small staff, 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 bought concerned within the improvement 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 referred to as Venture Tailwind, begins by creating a knowledge set of your supply materials, which you drag into the software from Google Docs or the clipboard. After the app has digested all of it, you may then ask NotebookLM questions on your materials, because of Google’s giant language mannequin expertise—partly powered by its just-released improve Gemini. The solutions replicate not solely what’s in your supply materials but additionally the broader basic understanding of the world that Gemini has. A essential characteristic 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 test the accuracy of its output.
Google just isn’t the one firm envisioning merchandise that permit folks create customized knowledge 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 job. 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 persona, whereas NotebookLM is designed to don’t have any such pretensions.
