The chatbot becomes the teacher

Steven Johnson is simply a precise meta author. He writes often astir subject and technology, and likes to immerse himself successful the things he’s covering, adjacent utilizing them to alteration the mode helium writes books. A mates of years ago, a fewer months earlier ChatGPT launched and the AI roar took implicit the tech world, Johnson got a mag assignment that sent him really, truly heavy down the AI rabbit hole. And helium ne'er came backmost up.

Now, successful summation to penning books, Johnson is besides moving astatine Google. He’s portion of the squad gathering a merchandise called NotebookLM — “Notebook,” arsenic the squad calls it. It’s a note-taking and probe tool: you upload documents and import web links, and Notebook’s Gemini-powered AI helps you signifier things, extract information, and recognize a taxable better. “They reached out,” Johnson says erstwhile I inquire however helium got progressive with Google, “and said, ‘hey, you’ve been dreaming of this perfect bundle instrumentality that helps you signifier your thoughts and helps you constitute and helps you formulate connections and brainstorm. We deliberation we tin bash it now.” Johnson signed up, and has been astatine Google since the summertime of 2022.

The merchandise itself archetypal launched successful 2023 as Project Tailwind, and has since been rebranded and expanded successful large ways. Just past week, the squad launched Audio Overviews, which generates a podcast — with 2 chatty hosts, plentifulness of backmost and forth, and a genuinely singular penchant for the phrases “deep dive” and “buckle up” — based connected the accusation you provide. It’s fascinating, it’s complicated, and it’s getting amended truly fast.

On this occurrence of The Vergecast, Johnson joins to sermon his fascination with AI, his clip astatine Google, and the contiguous and aboriginal of NotebookLM. We speech astir the analyzable issues raised by a instrumentality similar this, and whether it’s good to fto an AI bash your probe and homework.

We besides speech astir however to marque definite a instrumentality similar NotebookLM is some close and easy fact-checked, wherefore discourse windows are much important to the aboriginal of AI than astir radical realize, and however often AI podcast hosts should accidental “like” successful conversation. And we speech astir Johnson’s ain process arsenic a writer and creator, and however AI is changing the mode helium works.

If you privation to cognize much connected everything we sermon successful this episode, present are immoderate links to get you started: