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Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm does

Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all sources at once? - has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?

layer8 4y ago
Different people will have different opinions on which parts and aspects of a book are worthwhile or not. Books that were worthwhile to me ten years ago may not be worthwhile to me today, or in ten years, and vice versa. I don’t expect AI to be able to adequately address that anytime soon.
prometheus76 4y ago
We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that? In other words, why would you trust AI more than human curators/reviewers?
- kadoban 4y ago
  An AI could tailor it to the person, put it in context of other things already read, and essentially create a course of study for you. Humans can do the ~same, but it's pretty expensive. An AI could also improve on the status quo by being more consistent and there's _some_ possibility that it could be less biased than in human in several ways.
hoodwink 4y ago
hey there! thanks for the kind words :) on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting article by OpenAI on the topic: https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ *any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased) that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's what you're asking) *is there a random quote API that references all sources at once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets *has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?* not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x better than they were before
geysersam 4y ago
Sounds like a book review.

layer8 4y ago

Different people will have different opinions on which parts and aspects of a book are worthwhile or not. Books that were worthwhile to me ten years ago may not be worthwhile to me today, or in ten years, and vice versa. I don’t expect AI to be able to adequately address that anytime soon.

prometheus76 4y ago

We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that? In other words, why would you trust AI more than human curators/reviewers?

kadoban 4y ago
An AI could tailor it to the person, put it in context of other things already read, and essentially create a course of study for you. Humans can do the ~same, but it's pretty expensive. An AI could also improve on the status quo by being more consistent and there's _some_ possibility that it could be less biased than in human in several ways.

hoodwink 4y ago

hey there! thanks for the kind words :) on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting article by OpenAI on the topic: https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ *any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased) that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's what you're asking) *is there a random quote API that references all sources at once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets *has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?* not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x better than they were before

geysersam 4y ago

Sounds like a book review.