(2023-10-19) Johnson Introducing NotebookLM

Steven Johnson: Introducing NotebookLM. About five months ago, I shared the news that I was collaborating with Google on a new AI-based tool for thought, then code-named Project Tailwind.

The second big headline is that we have started letting people off the waitlist for the early access program

the core idea behind the current version of the product is what we call “source-grounded AI”: you define a set of documents that are important to your work—called “sources” in the NotebookLM parlance—and from that point on, you can have an open-ended conversation with the language model where its answers will be “grounded” in the information you’ve selected.

while it feels like you are interacting with an AI that has been trained on your own personal data, in reality that’s not what’s happening. Without getting too technical about it, when you interact with NotebookLM and ask questions based on your defined sources, we are putting your information into the short-term memory of the model. (Technically called the model’s “context window.”)

We now support PDFs and copied text as sources, along with Google Docs. You can now have 10 sources per notebook

But the feature that I am most excited about intellectually is this: as you interact with the AI in NotebookLM, we dynamically suggest three followup questions for you to ask, based both on the conversation so far and the specific information in your sources.

Let me give you an example of how this works in practice. I’ve loaded up the opening five chapters of my book Where Good Ideas Come From as a set of sources in NotebookLM.

With each chapter, NotebookLM generates what we call a “source guide,” offering a short summary of the document, a list of key topics that you can explore, and three suggested questions. So in this case I would start by clicking on the suggested question: How does the liquid network model help explain the rise of human innovation? This is what I get in response:

What are the benefits of having an open database of hunches?

And in a nicely symmetrical twist, this last one led to a suggested question about DEVONThink, the software I used for many years to organize all my notes and quotations...