(2023-12-15) Johnson Writing At The Speed Of Thought

Steven Johnson: Writing At The Speed Of Thought. NotebookLM, the AI-powered tool for thought I've been building with Google Labs for the past year or so, officially launched to users in the U.S. on Friday

The version that launched on Friday gives you a genuinely new interface for working in collaboration with a language model, creating a single, integrated space for reading, thinking, asking questions, and writing. Some of the most exciting features—what we call "suggested actions"—are going to be rolling out over the next week or two.

In his PlainText column at Wired on Friday, "Google’s NotebookLM Aims to Be the Ultimate Writing Assistant," Steven Levy tells the story of my long fascination with tools for thought. (2023-12-08-LevyGooglesNotebooklmAimsToBeTheUltimateWritingAssistant)

If you want to create the illusion of understanding something, you can indeed ask NotebookLM a question with the right sources and just copy and paste the answer, and make it look like you understand the topic at hand

eventually you're going to hit a wall where someone actually asks you in real-time about the thing you allegedly understand, or you’ll have to perform a task that demands real understanding, and the whole charade will fall apart.

But my belief is that most people will use NotebookLM in a good-faith attempt to understand the material they're working with.

To give you just two examples: two of our upcoming "suggested actions" are "help me understand" and "critique."

For a taste of how that works in practice, I’ve selected the two paragraphs I just wrote and asked NotebookLM to critique them. This is what I got back:

I'll take up NotebookLM's provocation that I should give more detailed examples of how the software can stimulate deeper thinking and creativity.

There are a lot of obvious ways the tool can do this. For instance, another suggested action that's about to roll out is "suggest related ideas

But there's another critical way that NotebookLM helps you "do your best thinking"—our tag line for the product—and that's as much about the interface as it is about the AI. The whole experience is designed to keep you in the writing/reading/thinking flow state, instead of constantly distracting you by forcing you to switch between tabs or applications

This is not just a problem writers have. Anytime you've found yourself working on a project with ten tabs open, copying and pasting information between apps, trying to find the thing you're looking for with exact keyword matches using command-F—all that mode switching is just disastrous for your focus.

Here's a little test I conceived to give you a sense of what I mean. As many of you know, I have an archive of quotations that I've accumulated using tools like ReadWise over the past twenty years or so. It's 1.3 million words of quotes that I currently have spread out over fifteen separate documents. I also have those fifteen documents loaded as sources in a single notebook in NotebookLM.

So the test is: how long will it take to find two quotes from two specific authors on specific topics and generate an idea for an interesting connection between the two quotes.

I came up with this challenge: "give me two quotes: one about cities from Jane Jacobs and another about ant colonies from Deborah Gordon. explain a surprising connection between them."

That took 11 seconds to generate (See screenshot)

it's not just the new capabilities of a source-grounded language model; it's also the way the whole environment is designed to liberate you from the kind of mindless archival tasks that have always been a part of multi-document projects

We also have a very active Discord community for NotebookLM if you'd like to join the conversation there.