After listening to Hard Fork this week, am playing around with NotebookLM, Google's new AI tool designed around "sources" uploaded by users and developed in collaboration with Steven Johnson.* Am excited that Google Labs is back and also, I agree with Casey Newton that NotebookLM is very "old school google": geeky, experimental and niche.
Listening to the podcast encouraged me to play around a bit with NotebookLM so here are some results. Sadly I think that sharing the notebooks themselves is limited to specific signed in accounts, so am provided a few podcasts and notes in Google docs. LMK if that's not true and I'll link to the complete notebooks.
First, I was about to visit the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunkers from which UK military command worked during the World War II. As a sidenote, they are really interesting. Especially the Map Room, which reminded me a lot of the way the Situation Room in the White House is a data collection hub in addition to a place for national security meetings. They also have a recreation of a July 9, 1944 Chiefs of Staff meeting debating Churchill's suggestion to consider bombing small German towns in retaliation for German bombing of civilian targets in London. That recreation is interesting both for the substance they discuss and also because it is very similar inn form to thousands of meetings I have been in, from a product team trying to decide whether to implement Sergey Brin's latest feature idea, to the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights team figuring out whether to make a West Wing suggested change in the document. Seeing that recreated was great.
Anyhow, before going to the War Rooms I printed to PDF three Wikipedia articles about Churchill, London in World War II and the Blitz and plugged them into NotebookLM. The resulting notebook was interesting and somewhat useful (here's some output from the notebook and podcast it generated). The podcast in particular was less of a primer than an bit of additional colour, though when I asked specifically for the notebook to tell me what I should know before visiting, it did a good job of summarizing some basic facts (see the end of the output document). I tried similar things for an upcoming Berlin visit including a set of web pages that focused on the history of Hitler's rise to power and a separate group focused on the airlift, the wall and the cold war in Berlin. These were also worth the time and interesting.
Then I split this blog up into 20 pdfs and uploaded them. That project was less successful. The podcast is cringeworthy and the notes are of varying quality.* Perhaps this is unsurprising given the really diverse set of posts I have up here. Seems that NotebookLM does better with documents that are thematically aligned or different descriptions of a single phenomenon. On the other hand, I liked that NotebookLM is not shy in saying when a source does not answer whatever question I asked (see the end of the notes doc).
In all, I enjoy these specific purpose built AI tools. I'm glad for the whimsical podcasts being added to a relatively dry product, even though I'm not sure they have a purpose. I'm thrilled that Google Labs is back and is trying stuff (I hadn't noticed before now). I'm not confident this is a thing that I'll keep using beyond the novelty but I'll keep playing around with it and seeing what sticks.
* !!! Really excited for this because I'm a huge fan of his work. If you haven't already read his books, I recommend either Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation or Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software as starting points.
** I tried it again from my non-Google Workspace account and got a very different set of results. I think these are substantially better, though still contain some straightforward errors. It could be that the NotebookLM running for Google Workspace accounts is different than the one running on regular Google accounts, so your mileage may vary.
Notebook LM
Posted by A M on 9/30/2024 0 comments [ Labels: ai, google ]
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