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NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
- corajoe 3y ago[flagged]
- senel 3y agoFirst question that came to mind was when will Google kill this service and when will I have to export all my content?
- going_ham 3y agoThis was immediately my first thought when I saw the product. When is the expiry day? Why aren’t they making it clear? Also I think this will inspire other companies and help those companies (cough microsoft, apple) create their own version which they will integrate to their own lineup. It will be interesting seeing it in future. Disclaimer: I am not AI and I typed this response in my tablet. People for some reason have tendency to assume I answer like a bot.
- civilitty 3y agoAccording to GPT4, you had a 75% chance of being a bot before the disclaimer. With the disclaimer it gives me a 100% chance or OpenAI will give me my money back.
- going_ham 3y agoHaha. That was a funny response from the GPT. I attacked your bot unintentionally! On serious note, do you think as society progresses with use of AI, our brain will be geared toward filtering everything or we will lose the trust system that is prevalent in the society? Think about it, the more people are being shut for bot, they more likely they will stop interacting online and this might eventually lead to a lot of people discarding the interaction. For most part, life is pretty average. And if average people are out, what might be the implications?
- civilitty 3y agoI've long assumed I'm just a brain in a vat. Solves all those thorny theoretical problems by just tossing the concept of other conscious individuals out the window altogether. I think, therefore only I am.
- neongodzilla 3y agoYou don't sound like a bot so much as your responses are probably extremely average and predictable, thus aligning with bot content.
- slt2021 3y agothere are AI bots and there are HN bots.... both have canned responses, but each have specific flavor
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MetaverseClub 3y agoA new prototype from Gogle for collecting user data and will be dumped anytime soon once it collects enough data or it fails.
- phillipcarter 3y agoWoof. Talk about a bad reputation exemplified. I can't imagine what it's like working on stuff like this at Google, earnestly just trying to make a great product people will want to use, only to have to fight decades of user-hostile product destruction that the company has done.
- croes 3y agoBecause it's always either a data grabber or a soon-to-be-killed service
- slt2021 3y agoit is either a data grabber or a promo grabber
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- __loam 3y agoMaybe if Google wanted to have a better reputation they wouldn't habitually kill products.
- thefourthchime 3y agoOnly us big nerds on Hacker News actually pay attention to this or care. Most people never even hear about this stuff. From what I understand, in the Google world, you release a product, you get a promotion. So, as cynical as it is, and everyone in Google knows, their product will get cancelled eventually. Screw it, I got a promotion, I got some money. It's good for my career.
- 3y ago
- wodenokoto 3y agoDoesn’t this take away the important part of doing notes? The writing? A good AI should foster a discussion with the student, not write notes.
- vaughnegut 3y agoThis is exactly what it does, no? The product explicitly is about taking your notes that you write and being able to discuss those notes with the AI. It's in all of the screenshots and the description.
- ImaCake 3y agoI mean I would take AI autocomplete in the style of copilot. That feels conversational enough already, it would be even better if it’s optimised for prose instead of code. The MS word autocomplete is getting pretty good and I would love more of it personally.
- ztratar 3y agoFor such a good idea, this design is comically bad.
- vogon_laureate 3y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one. Yikes.
- xnx 3y agoThis seems like a good alternative to all the "ask a PDF a question" GPT wrappers that have sprung up.
- jerpint 3y agoHaving implemented my own "ask a PDF a question" GPT wrapper, there's a lot of design decisions / complexity that can make it better/worse and I'm not sure how much a "one-size fits all" google approach will work for google. Convenient that it plugs in directly to your gdrive though.
- ImaCake 3y agoGoogle will be leveraging the millions of people using google docs that will never go out of their way to use an ask a PDF tool. I know I haven’t bothered even though I am technically skilled enough to do so.
- moffkalast 3y agoIf it's powered by Bard then it'll probably drastically underperform all of those.
- htrp 3y agoWhy did they have to rename Project Tailwind? They literally announced it 2 months ago.
- croes 3y agoNo connection to GPT or LLM in the name, bad for marketing
- politelemon 3y agoI suggest GPTaiLLMwind
- thefourthchime 3y agohow about “killed by Google #545”
- fumar 3y agoWhy would I use any google service with a death countdown on its forehead? I have migrated away from Google almost completely. I can’t imagine being a product team there and having to defend product’s existence for more than a year.
- politelemon 3y agoBecause now you can ask the service itself when it will be shut down.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joemi 3y agoIt’s not like some random unproven startup is any better though, unless the product really takes off and makes them money (and they don’t ruin it somehow).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alomaki 3y agoNotebookLM: I thought it has something to do something with jupyter notebook Tailwind: something to do with CSS Very bad naming
- shilangyu 3y agoOriginally when teased at Google IO this product was called project tailwind but the URL was thoughtful.sandbox.google.com (it seems to now redirect to the notebooklm URL). "Thoughtful sandbox" feels like a much more fitting name.
- LoveMortuus 3y agoDon't worry about naming, it'll probably get killed anyways.
- slt2021 3y agoLooks like somebody at GOGLE is up for grabbing that promotion! Congrats to authors on their Lxx level and promo grant...
- behnamoh 3y agoMy thoughts exactly! These days I don't take any new service/product from Google seriously because the incentive system in that company is just flawed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- franze 3y agoThere should be a name for Waitlist Vapoware: Waitware Vapolist ? Any other ideas?
- stOneskull 3y agowait-n-vape
- teddyh 3y agoWaitporware.
- joelesler 3y agoToday in: Things that Google will kill off in a minute, so don't use.
- replwoacause 3y agoNo way in hell I trust Google enough to use this
- Takennickname 3y agoI guess Sam Altman lives on in YC. You would think everyone here was close friends with him.
- blitzar 3y agoThis product sh*ts all over what Sam is offering up at the moment.
- mugivarra69 3y agothank god, finally i can stop using langchain for taco hunt
- raajg 3y agoDear Google, you've burned me so many times after I've fallen in love with your products. I have experienced the cold sting of disappointment far too many times. When you abruptly discontinue services like Google Buzz and Google Reader, you leave me stranded with no reasonable alternatives. This pattern of abandonment has plagued our relationship, instilling in me a sense of apprehension each time you introduce a new product.
- throwaway675309 3y agoAgreed, I'm still in the process of painfully migrating my domains over from Google domains to Cloudflare.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 3y agoDo any of the "chat with your documents" type applications have Google Drive integration? Because it's unlikely that Google will take away the API for Drive. But an experimental project like this could easily go up in a puff of red mist.
- wanderingmind 3y agoDanswer, MIT licenses. Discussed a few days back in HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36667374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36667374
- blitzar 3y agocurrently available in the U.S. only
- sebow 3y ago> Google: "Look, we're capable, but just beta-test this sh&t so we can make a product that will definitely overshadow our little contribution, okay? We need the product, we need the money. You'll get a nice little badge on your profile to signal your interest with your peers. This is open and responsible AI." Respectfully, nobody gives a f&ck. The actual way you do it is at least publish a paper(or butchered code) or make the product accessible to all.(Or to a number of people that scales proportionally with your claims of greatness). You cannot do either of those? Well that smells of trying to be opportunistic, doesn't it? If i recall, OpenAI in it's infancy with the GPT* family at least published some papers (which Google also used to do, by the way), then they built upon that to eventually release a product. Yes the product was never free at the beginning nor very publicized, because it wasn't advertised to be the holy grail of anything. To sum up my opinion on this matter: you can never truly scale and innovate with >only releasing a lobotomized product< or >only releasing a paper with no visible applications<. You need a little balance between sparking interest and satisfying the hype you give about the product(if any).*
- whoevercares 3y ago[flagged]
- vogon_laureate 3y agoThis is amazing! I can't wait to post about this on Google Wave, Google Currents, Orkut, Jaiku, Google Friend Connect, and Google+, read all about it on Google Reader and Google FastFlip, chat about it with friends on Buzz, Duo, Google Talk, Hangouts, and also blog on my website made with Google Page Creator or Web Hosting on Google Drive or Google Sites. It's just so reassuring to know I can depend on the Google ecosystem of products long in to the future.
- vogon_laureate 3y agoObligatory link to Killed By Google.[1] [1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mbreese 3y agoI get it. Google has a lot of killed/closed products. But that’s kind of their MO. They try a lot of things. Sometimes they work (Gmail was an experiment at one point), but they often don’t. Making fun of their killed products is a favorite HN past time, but what would you have them do? Just sit back and not try to make new things? Or keep zombie projects alive, but unmaintained just because a few of us find it really helpful? Those are the projects I find the saddest. The ones that would have been a good product for a smaller company (or was a smaller company that was acquired), but that isn’t profitable enough at “Google scale” to keep throwing money at. I get it. Google kills a lot of products that early adopters like. Google Reader was painful to lose at the time. But how many RSS feeds do you now follow? Let’s just evaluate this new project on its own merits. Do you find it helpful or not — without thinking too much about Googles track record. If this way of using AI is helpful (and I’m very hopeful), then either Google will keep it, or this is the POC a small startup will use to keep something like this around. If it fails, then at least we’ll all have learned something.
- unsui 3y ago> but what would you have them do? I dunno....maybe SUPPORT THE DAMNED PRODUCT? As much crap as microsoft gets, they know how to support a product. Spin it off? Open-source it? so many other options..... Do something to return the investment that the users have made in the product (after all, a product alone has no value without its actual users). Anything but simply killing it off.
- boredemployee 3y agodoes anyone have a link to a site that summarizes other sites? sometimes I just want to know 2 or 3 main sentences about a "news" or blog post like that. I developed a phobia of reading an entire website (usually about AI) and being disappointed because I wasted my time on something completely useless.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- peterisza 3y agoWhen I read the title, I thought it was a notebook
- whimsicalism 3y agoFundamentally, Google needs a working foundation model before it can build complex products like these. Bard is not up to snuff.
- famouswaffles 3y agoDon't think bard is so bad that something like this couldn't at least be useful.
- pphysch 3y agoGoogle Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades, longer than the iPhone. NotebookLM is another way to read your Google Docs, with LLM assistance. If NotebookLM gets killed off, you still have your Google Docs and can read them with your eyeballs or some other LLM. HN loves to shit on Google for their loose trail-and-error approach to product releases, but Google Docs is evidently not one of those loose products.
- thefourthchime 3y agoI think everybody used to love Google. Around 2012, they were just making one hit after another. Google Docs, Google Maps, Gmail, they revolutionized search! What have they done in the last 10 years? Jack shit, except, launch a bunch of things that might have been cool, but then just killed it. How many messenger apps have they had? Google Stadia? I mean, come on, the list is incredible.
- pphysch 3y agoThe idea of "stanning/hating" a megacorporation, one of the most powerful entities on the planet, is a priori absurd in the vein of Bryan Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphize Oracle". Apple spends billions of dollars promoting its global brand as a culture and way of life; this does not mean we need to apply this framework to other brands. Spewing negativity (or positivity) about Google in this context is a self-own, because it signals that you have fallen for the "brand loyalty" cantrip.
- Angostura 3y agoWhy are you replying to a comment about the lack of recent innovation at Google and product positioning missteps with a comment talking about 'stanning/hating. That's not what the commmenter is doing.
- pphysch 3y agoReread the first sentence of that comment. Besides, this discussion isn't about "innovation", it's about Google killing products. Google is possibly the most innovative tech megacorporation precisely because of their experimental approach to product releases.
- endisneigh 3y agoI wish the folks who clearly do not like Google would just not use their products instead of spamming every thread about how they will kill the product, true or not. —— Anyway, It’s not clear which model they’re using for this. I assume whatever Bard is using, but who knows. This is relevant because depending on the intended experience the latency will matter. Overall it’s not a bad idea, but I do wonder what the monetization path will be for Google. I imagine this will be part of workspace. Perhaps they will add more tiers to include these offerings. I wish they shared a bit about how this will be differentiated from Bard. Is this simply a new front end to Bard? It’s really an open question. I haven’t seen many products that use LLMs that are better than the prompt response UX. The most interesting thing about this blog post is the “source grounding.” I’m curious if there’s actual engineering behind it, or is it prompt tweaking contextualized behind the scenes on a given doc.
- arikrak 3y ago+1. It's labeled as an experiment, of course it might shut down.
- chefandy 3y agoGmail was in "beta" for 5 years after its public launch-- those labels aren't really useful.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- px43 3y agoBard isn't a model, it's a product. Bard was launched with PaLM originally, the same model that the one employee claimed was sentient. At Google I/O they announced PaLM2 and switched over to Bard being backed by it, while also making Bard open to the general public on the same day. Google is currently in the process of training Gemini, which is positioned to be their GPT-4 killer, as it's multi-modal, and presumably quite a bit more powerful than GPT-4 is. PaLM2 is more analogous to GPT-3. NotebookLM is a very different product than Bard. Bard has a vague understanding of the information on the internet, and NotebookLM will, presumably, have some level of understanding of your personal documents. It will almost certainly be using PaLM2 until Gemini is ready. That will be neat because Gemini will be able to look at images and read visual charts in your documents. PaLM2 is only able to comprehend text.
- Luctct 3y agoBrave new world. I can't wait for the AI toilet, the AI toothbrush and the AI Pez dispenser.
- trolan 3y agoI think a Language Model being used to summarize text with specific direction is one of the primary use cases. I don't really see too many gimmicks here, besides the obvious Google issues
- a-dub 3y agovery cool! was actually contemplating what it would take to build something like this for myself! personal text processors are a great direction for NLP based AI!
- lusus_naturae 3y agoIs there this, but with something like Joplin? I couldn't find anything. edit: Someone did this for Joplin: https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-jarvis-ai-assistant-v0-5-1-9-7-23/28316/8 https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-jarvis-ai-assistant...
- bg24 3y ago“ A key difference between NotebookLM and traditional AI chatbots is that NotebookLM lets you “ground” the language model in your notes and sources. Source-grounding effectively creates a personalized AI that’s versed in the information relevant to you. Starting today, you can ground NotebookLM in specific Google Docs that you choose, and we’ll be adding additional formats soon.” While it sounds promising, the blog post should have explained the obvious thing: how is source-grounding different from giving a document to a model and generate insights?
- carlossouza 3y agoImagine you are a screenwriter, and you are writing a fiction script, reimagining events in the past (e.g. Inglorious Bastards).. I wonder what this product would answer when asked how the WW2 ended. How would this source-grounding mechanism work? Would it answer based on the truth/facts or on the source provided by the author?
- ignoramous 3y ago> how is source-grounding different from giving a document to a model and generate insights? You mean, fine-tuning? If so, grounding LLMs is cheaper: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/fasttrack-for-azure/grounding-llms/ba-p/3843857 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/fasttrack-for-azure/g...
- nl 3y agoI love this as a product idea. I can't sign up (because I'm outside the US). I think I could build a local-only version with a local LLM possibly local datasources that would do a pretty good job. Local LLMs are sufficiently powerful for query expansion techniques so the capability gap there to GPT4/Bard isn't a problem. They are definitely behind on generative capabilities, but since I'm unable to use the product it is unclear how important that is in this use-case. If there is a video I'd appreciate a link! I wonder how popular a local version of something like that would be?
- tohmasch 3y agoNot to plug too hard, but I am building a version of this to be local and friendly for your workflows. The aim is to help people organize, discovery, and pull insights out of their knowledge bases using LLM's as cognitive functions for Q/A as well as pre-thought generated points and summarizes. Would love to ask for you feedback. https://www.knowd.ai/ https://www.knowd.ai/
- spicyramen_ 3y ago[dead]
- tasubotadas 3y ago"We are amazing though leaders and AI product developers" "We created this amazing tool that will change the world and is awesome and everything" "But you need to sign up for the waitlist" "you need to be in the US" "you need to sign NDA" Amazing.
- htrp 3y agoAnyone else notice that if you try to signup at https://notebooklm.google.com/signup https://notebooklm.google.com/signup the chat link in the upper left leads to a discord?