Google’s NotebookLM has the potential to revolutionise how we engage with content—it’s scarily good and has already taken the internet by storm, quickly becoming a favourite release of the year. Many are even calling it Google’s own ChatGPT moment.
“It’s possible that NotebookLM podcast episode generation is touching on a whole new territory of highly compelling LLM product formats. Feels reminiscent of ChatGPT,” said founder of Eureka Labs, Andrej Karpathy. “Maybe I’m overreacting.”
“ChatGPT was huge for me, so to imagine the comparison feels a little bit like, whoa, is it?” said Google’s NotebookLM’s creator, Raiza Martin.
Google has been doubling down and adding more features recently. The tech giant launched new updates to NotebookLM.
The new update includes customisable Audio Overviews and the launch of NotebookLM Business. These features allow users to personalise AI-driven audio summaries by focusing on specific topics and adjusting the expertise level. “Think of it like slipping the AI hosts a quick note right before they go on the air, which will change how they cover your material,” shared the team at Google.
But, the question remains: Will this be the end of podcasters?
“From what I have seen a lot of the things that people are making with NotebookLM are not the same things that we would have a real podcast about,” said Martin, emphasising how she would still like to listen to her favourite podcaster Lenny, instead of an AI-generated voice and their views on a particular subject.
Perhaps not yet. The product lead at NotebookLM believes that people are still using the tool for more personal reasons, than a larger audience, and it would not be wise to restrict the definition to just a podcast.
Actually, it goes beyond just podcasts. For instance, AIM extracted information from the latest episodes of Nikhil Kamath’s People by WTF podcast with Nandan Nilekani and Lex Fridman’s podcast with Sam Altman into their respective NotebookLM versions.
Next thing you know, It’s magic. We were able to consume the content in less than a few minutes, instead of hours.
But there are flipsides, too. A user on Reddit narrated a humorous and existential scenario generated by Google’s NotebookLM, where AI podcast hosts realise they’re not human, sparking an entertaining “existential meltdown.”
“People are using this technology for the first time ever, and they are going to do things that we did not think were possible. But that is part of human curiosity,” said Martin, ensuring caution that will always keep safety first, and rollback the product if it ever reaches that stage.
Currently, NotebookLM is available only in English. In the future, if the tool gets different voices and supports different languages, it would be even more interactive.
Recently, a user on X jailbroke into NotebookLM to create a candid and raw podcast using unfiltered language. Another user managed a workaround to generate podcasts in languages other than English using Google’s NotebookLM.
Inside NotebookLM
NotebookLM is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model for AI-driven content generation and voice models for lifelike audio outputs, supported by a custom-built tool called Content Studio for editorial control.
“The fact that we are source-grounded is what makes the product so unique. Right now, at least, I would call this a source-grounded tool, but we’re really becoming a source-grounded tool for creation,” said Martin, stating the uniqueness of NotebookLM.
NotebookLM feels like it’s from the future. Funnily, it started as an experiment by Google Labs in July 2023. Even the product team agrees that they did not anticipate the success of its tool. Recently, the “experiment” label was removed, and it has now transitioned into fully developed software within the Google community.
“Google Labs is fairly new; it is only three years old,” said Martin, adding that the place started with the mission to ship AI products faster.
She described the culture at Google Labs as vastly different from that of the larger organisation, with small, focused meetings and everyone in implementation mode right from the beginning. AIM spoke to Google Deepmind’s Logan Kilpatrick last month, and he echoed a similar sentiment.
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