10 ms·

I Taught My 8yo Subduction Zones with NotebookLM

122 points by tkellogg 2y ago

yas_hmaheshwari 2y ago
Thank you Stranger! I have been seeing lots of articles about NotebookLM, but had never tried it. Today I am going to try this (with a different article) for my 6 year old daughter. This looks super amazing to teach tough concepts to kids Thank you!
- hansoolo 2y ago
  Indeed! The only downside is that my kids don't speak English yet...
gyomu 2y ago
The important bit here is that you spent time with your kid and engaged with her, not the tech that you put in front of her. Neal Stephenson, when asked on how to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer real: “Kids need to get answers from humans who love them”
- Filligree 2y ago
  A point the book explicitly made…
- IanCal 2y ago
  I don't know why people immediately try and shut this kind of thing down. Sure, them spending time together is important. However for what happened here so is the podcast about subduction zones at a level the kid could take something from.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sakos 2y ago
    We don't actually like tech or hacking here. I'm not sure why it's called Hacker News anymore. Feels like this post is right up HN's alley, then I see a comment like theirs. There are so many benefits to AI, that I've directly experienced in how it's transformed how I can interact with videos, books, and research/learning in general, and it feels like half the site is just "nuh-uh". It's like low-key gaslighting.
    - rpastuszak 2y ago
      > We don't actually like tech or hacking here. I think that's a very ungenerous reading of the parent comment. Sure, LLMs are useful (I use them to digest/filter larger bodies of text myself, several times per day), I'm not denying that. But, if we had to remove one of the two aspects discussed in the article (and the comment), which one would be more valuable to the kid: the attention of their parent or having access to notebooklm? As someone with a hacker attitude (fwiw) I find less technical or dumb solutions to problems more interesting. Like, no one is saying that the LLM wasn't useful here. Both can be true at the same time. What's interesting is how these two concepts relate.
      - Sakos 2y ago
        I think their comment is very ungenerous of what this kind of thing provides in being able to engage in a dialogue about a particular thing. It can be insanely difficult to break things down for somebody unfamiliar to a particular topic especially if you yourself don't have copious amounts of knowledge and practice in it. I repeatedly see people fail to understand the benefit of something like this because they refuse to want to. > which one would be more valuable to the kid: the attention of their parent or having access to notebooklm Sorry, this is stupid. As a parent, you want to look for tools and methods to help teach the child new things. Something like this is insanely helpful and it isn't a question of "would you rather have a parent or would you rather have notebooklm". Nobody is suggesting we replace parents and nobody is going to give a child these choices. It's a complete misrepresentation of the situation and distracts from the benefits, as a teacher or as a parent, of having access to tools like this. My god, it's frustrating having these idiotic conversations every time LLM comes up. > But, if we had to remove one of the two aspects discussed in the article This was never up for debate until that comment. It's stupid and unproductive. So many times I see parents and teachers look for robot kits or books or courses or other types of kits (Arduino anybody?) to help children engage with new topics and learn new things. And people are always very supportive and helpful in these kinds of things, because it's a GOOD THING to want to help children. But I never see somebody be like "but what's actually important here? The robot kit or the parent being there?" NOBODY ASKED UNTIL THEY DID. It wasn't up for fucking debate. Why is it when it's LLM that suddenly this is so important to point out? Why don't I see that when somebody talks about how great it was to go through an Arduino kit with their kid?
  - gyomu 2y ago
    I'm not sure where you saw the intent to shut it down - OP is doing a great job being involved with their kid, if only every parent was like this! - just making sure people don't get confused about what is going here, as we routinely see (including on this very site) tech people who genuinely believe that human teachers can and should be replaced with AI.
mungoman2 2y ago
I'm looking forward to this expanding to other languages. There is so much great information out there, but unfortunately mostly in English. LLMs are really great at translating, and together with recent text-to-speech, seems straight-forward for the tool to consume inputs in English and do the podcast generation in another language. Would be a great step in spreading knowledge across cultures and backgrounds.
strofocles 2y ago
I am really impressed by the podcast it generates and I hope they will introduce other voices/styles because this style can be too much for some people (including me). Not so impressed about the chat experience though. Sometimes it sounds the bot is annoyed at my questions :) Which is a refreshing change from the pathological politeness of ChatGPT.
tivert 2y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561
timkq 2y ago
Impressive! I'm wondering if something like this is possible with other models, because of Gemini's extremely large context length certainly helping a lot with parsing such large documents.
bpesquet 2y ago
I'm a CS/AI teacher in an engineering school. A few days ago, towards the end of my course on convolutional neural networks, I asked my students to explain why tha first linear layer of the example PyTorch network had a specific number of neurons. This is a non-trivial question whose answer isn't directly available online (it depends on the input dimensions and the nature of all previous layers). They struggled for a while, and the first student who gave the right answer explained how he did it. All morning, he interacted with ChatGPT while following my course, asking questions each time my own explanations weren't sufficient for him to understand. He managed to give the LLM enough context and information for it to spit not only the right answer, but also the whole underlying process to obtain it. In French, qui plus est ;) This was for me an eye-opening, but also a bit unsettling experience. I don't use ChatGPT & co much for now, so this might seems pretty mundane to some of you. Anyway, I realized that during any lecture or lab, teachers will soon face (or are already facing) augmented students able to check and consolidate their understanding in real time. This is great news for education as a whole, but it certainly interrogates our current teaching model.
- andrepd 2y ago
  "Check and consolidate their understanding" by reading generated text that is not checked and has the same confident tone whether it's completely made-up or actually correct? I don't get it. >interrogates our current teaching model Jesus, many many things put our current teaching model in question, chatgpt is NOT one of them. Tbh this excitement is an example of focusing on the "cool new tech" instead of the "unsexy" things that actually matter.
  - NitpickLawyer 2y ago
    > by reading generated text that is not checked and has the same confident tone whether it's completely made-up or actually correct? I don't get it. This is a valid point, but it's referring to the state of things as of ~1.5 years ago. The field has evolved a lot, and now you can readily augment LLMs answers with context in the form of validated, sourced and "approved" knowledge. Is it possible that you are having a visceral reaction to the "cool new tech" without yourself having been exposed to the latest state of that tech? To me your answer seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the "AI hype" but if you look at how things evolved over the past year, there's a clear indication that these issues will get ironed out, and the next iterations will be better in every way. I wonder, at that point, where the goalposts will be moved...
globular-toast 2y ago
I've been trying to add high quality elevation data to the maps on my blog. I'm way out of my depth trying to convert things from one format to another. There are seemingly endless ways to store the data and a bunch of acronyms (DEM, DTM, DSM, SRTM etc.) Anyway, I resorted to ChatGPT to help. It gave me a complete end to end process, including how to install tools, that was almost entirely wrong at every step. But, in one step it pointed me towards a tool I didn't know about, and that too finally plugged the gap I needed. I was able to do this because I treat ChatGPT like any other source of knowledge: with a healthy dose of scepticism. Almost everything I do is piecing together knowledge from different sources, written at different levels for different audiences etc. What worries me is whether kids are going to miss out on this. Seeing a fully typeset document or listening to pristine audio of someone who intentionally sounds so confidently correct seems like it will really fuck with their ability to discern the truth. They'll either believe everything, or they'll believe nothing. What worries me even more is these models are controlled by an oligopoly who twist and bend them to fit their own beliefs and narratives. Instead of going to the public library children will be getting knowledge filtered through layers of "AI" that will never tell them anything it's not supposed to tell them.
guy234 2y ago
This article could be improved by deleting the emojis from it.
pknerd 2y ago
Thanks for sharing. Does NotebookLM covers other languages as well, for instance Urdu, arabic or Farsi?
- lemming 2y ago
  Right now the podcasts are only in English, and (I believe) only use English sources. I'm sure this will change soon enough though.
  - Kurtz79 2y ago
    I fed it an Italian Wikipedia entry and it generated a (relevant) podcast and summaries in English, so at least the input seem to support multiple languages even if the output is in English. If I had come across something like this 2/3 years ago it would have looked like magic, but even now it’s quite impressive. Edit: You can change the language following the indications in the FAQ; after that, text generation seems to be in the configured language, but the podcast is still in English.
  - tkgally 2y ago
    I gave it a book in Japanese that I wrote and it generated an accurate podcast about it in English.
lexandstuff 2y ago
The NotebookLM podcast feature is so unbelievably good! I've been feeding it random papers I've always wanted to read, and it's giving me these entertaining high-level summaries. The banter is almost addictive. Also, reading the papers in detail is quite easy after you understand the topics.
- namaria 2y ago
  Language model summaries can change meaning in hard to detect ways unless you're a very knowledgeable specialist.
  - jstummbillig 2y ago
    So does your brain.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- qlm 2y ago
  I fed it a pretty short article (~8000 words), and multiple times it said literally the exact opposite of what the article stated or made parts up entirely. I'd suggest reading and understanding whatever you give it because it will almost certainly lead you astray.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    And even when it is technically right it often goes off on tangents not in the paper -- for instance I fed it one of my papers on a pipeline to analyze microbiome data and it spent half of the "podcast" on talking about how important the microbiome is to health and how health care needs to take the microbiome in mind. All true, but it doesn't have to do with the pipeline! That being said, I'm blown away by how realistic the voices are and how they often interrupt and talk over each other the way that real human podcasters do.
gammacine 2y ago
It’s crazy how good NotebookLM is at summarizing information. I've been using it non-stop to quickly get through a pile of articles I usually put off, and it’s honestly freeing up so much time. It's not just the saving time part but it feels like I'm actually getting more out of what I read. Makes me wonder what we'll be able to do with this kind of technology in the next few years!
foobarbecue 2y ago
Tectonic, not "techtonic." And poor kid, being fed this AI sludge. If you want to teach an 8-year-old about subduction, use the Magic School Bus!
- tkellogg 2y ago
  lolololol, no that's me. I don't use AI at all while writing, which is why I make these mistakes
  - foobarbecue 2y ago
    I also find that words I type commonly (e.g. "tech"), get so wired into muscle memory, that they sometimes show up where they don't belong!
leegen_1 2y ago
On a parallel note - came across this damn useful use case of NotebookLM : atomicideas.ai - creating engaging audiobooks from the book summaries. Is NotebookLM the most innovative AI product from Google in the GenAI space?
- bsenftner 2y ago
  Note sure about what I think of the ethics of what Atomicideas 2.0 is doing: taking classic literature and making that a Q&A chatbot, for a fee.
supernova87a 2y ago
Wow, I honestly was not intending to click through and pay much attention to TFA, but I pressed "play" just to see, and I was honestly immediately hooked. Maybe because I'm saturated with LLM stories, and yet another summarization use case, blah blah blah. There is something fascinating here to me that two (synthetic) people talking to each other engaged my attention, and then amazement that they were turning this esoteric paper into a radio show at the popular level. (or for any paper whose content would never actually warrant two real people making a radio show about it, if you could even pay them to do so) Maybe an aspect of it is that if two people are talking about something, it inherently has passed a filter that "it might be interesting" to know about. Surprisingly eye opening about the technology here.
parkaboy 2y ago
This is amazing. Would love an actual geophysicist to chime in to verify how accurate this was. I really felt like I learned something...but did I?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tivert 2y ago
[originally posted to a previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561] Honestly, the resulting "podcast" is kind of underwhelming as an actual artifact. It's basically "plate tectonics for kids" mixed with some gobbledygook from the input paper. Sure it's kind of neat as a tech demo, but to actually try to use that just show the mediocritizing to enshittfying influence of LLMs. Honestly, I think the guy would have gotten an even better response from his kid from any competently done "plate tectonics for kids" video (e.g. from Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/middle-school-earth-and-space-science/x87d03b443efbea0a:the-geosphere/x87d03b443efbea0a:plate-tectonics/v/introduction-to-plate-tectonics https://www.khanacademy.org/science/middle-school-earth-and-...). Curation and digital distribution basically solved this problem earlier with better results. LLMs are just a shittier private label article factory version (https://blog.smashwords.com/2010/01/scam-of-private-label-articles.html https://blog.smashwords.com/2010/01/scam-of-private-label-ar...).

122 points by tkellogg 2y ago

Thank you Stranger! I have been seeing lots of articles about NotebookLM, but had never tried it. Today I am going to try this (with a different article) for my 6 year old daughter. This looks super amazing to teach tough concepts to kids Thank you!

hansoolo 2y ago
Indeed! The only downside is that my kids don't speak English yet...

gyomu 2y ago

The important bit here is that you spent time with your kid and engaged with her, not the tech that you put in front of her. Neal Stephenson, when asked on how to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer real: “Kids need to get answers from humans who love them”

Filligree 2y ago
A point the book explicitly made…
IanCal 2y ago
I don't know why people immediately try and shut this kind of thing down. Sure, them spending time together is important. However for what happened here so is the podcast about subduction zones at a level the kid could take something from.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Sakos 2y ago
  We don't actually like tech or hacking here. I'm not sure why it's called Hacker News anymore. Feels like this post is right up HN's alley, then I see a comment like theirs. There are so many benefits to AI, that I've directly experienced in how it's transformed how I can interact with videos, books, and research/learning in general, and it feels like half the site is just "nuh-uh". It's like low-key gaslighting.
  - rpastuszak 2y ago
    > We don't actually like tech or hacking here. I think that's a very ungenerous reading of the parent comment. Sure, LLMs are useful (I use them to digest/filter larger bodies of text myself, several times per day), I'm not denying that. But, if we had to remove one of the two aspects discussed in the article (and the comment), which one would be more valuable to the kid: the attention of their parent or having access to notebooklm? As someone with a hacker attitude (fwiw) I find less technical or dumb solutions to problems more interesting. Like, no one is saying that the LLM wasn't useful here. Both can be true at the same time. What's interesting is how these two concepts relate.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      I think their comment is very ungenerous of what this kind of thing provides in being able to engage in a dialogue about a particular thing. It can be insanely difficult to break things down for somebody unfamiliar to a particular topic especially if you yourself don't have copious amounts of knowledge and practice in it. I repeatedly see people fail to understand the benefit of something like this because they refuse to want to. > which one would be more valuable to the kid: the attention of their parent or having access to notebooklm Sorry, this is stupid. As a parent, you want to look for tools and methods to help teach the child new things. Something like this is insanely helpful and it isn't a question of "would you rather have a parent or would you rather have notebooklm". Nobody is suggesting we replace parents and nobody is going to give a child these choices. It's a complete misrepresentation of the situation and distracts from the benefits, as a teacher or as a parent, of having access to tools like this. My god, it's frustrating having these idiotic conversations every time LLM comes up. > But, if we had to remove one of the two aspects discussed in the article This was never up for debate until that comment. It's stupid and unproductive. So many times I see parents and teachers look for robot kits or books or courses or other types of kits (Arduino anybody?) to help children engage with new topics and learn new things. And people are always very supportive and helpful in these kinds of things, because it's a GOOD THING to want to help children. But I never see somebody be like "but what's actually important here? The robot kit or the parent being there?" NOBODY ASKED UNTIL THEY DID. It wasn't up for fucking debate. Why is it when it's LLM that suddenly this is so important to point out? Why don't I see that when somebody talks about how great it was to go through an Arduino kit with their kid?
- gyomu 2y ago
  I'm not sure where you saw the intent to shut it down - OP is doing a great job being involved with their kid, if only every parent was like this! - just making sure people don't get confused about what is going here, as we routinely see (including on this very site) tech people who genuinely believe that human teachers can and should be replaced with AI.

mungoman2 2y ago

I'm looking forward to this expanding to other languages. There is so much great information out there, but unfortunately mostly in English. LLMs are really great at translating, and together with recent text-to-speech, seems straight-forward for the tool to consume inputs in English and do the podcast generation in another language. Would be a great step in spreading knowledge across cultures and backgrounds.

strofocles 2y ago

I am really impressed by the podcast it generates and I hope they will introduce other voices/styles because this style can be too much for some people (including me). Not so impressed about the chat experience though. Sometimes it sounds the bot is annoyed at my questions :) Which is a refreshing change from the pathological politeness of ChatGPT.

tivert 2y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561

timkq 2y ago

Impressive! I'm wondering if something like this is possible with other models, because of Gemini's extremely large context length certainly helping a lot with parsing such large documents.

bpesquet 2y ago

I'm a CS/AI teacher in an engineering school. A few days ago, towards the end of my course on convolutional neural networks, I asked my students to explain why tha first linear layer of the example PyTorch network had a specific number of neurons. This is a non-trivial question whose answer isn't directly available online (it depends on the input dimensions and the nature of all previous layers). They struggled for a while, and the first student who gave the right answer explained how he did it. All morning, he interacted with ChatGPT while following my course, asking questions each time my own explanations weren't sufficient for him to understand. He managed to give the LLM enough context and information for it to spit not only the right answer, but also the whole underlying process to obtain it. In French, qui plus est ;) This was for me an eye-opening, but also a bit unsettling experience. I don't use ChatGPT & co much for now, so this might seems pretty mundane to some of you. Anyway, I realized that during any lecture or lab, teachers will soon face (or are already facing) augmented students able to check and consolidate their understanding in real time. This is great news for education as a whole, but it certainly interrogates our current teaching model.

andrepd 2y ago
"Check and consolidate their understanding" by reading generated text that is not checked and has the same confident tone whether it's completely made-up or actually correct? I don't get it. >interrogates our current teaching model Jesus, many many things put our current teaching model in question, chatgpt is NOT one of them. Tbh this excitement is an example of focusing on the "cool new tech" instead of the "unsexy" things that actually matter.
- NitpickLawyer 2y ago
  > by reading generated text that is not checked and has the same confident tone whether it's completely made-up or actually correct? I don't get it. This is a valid point, but it's referring to the state of things as of ~1.5 years ago. The field has evolved a lot, and now you can readily augment LLMs answers with context in the form of validated, sourced and "approved" knowledge. Is it possible that you are having a visceral reaction to the "cool new tech" without yourself having been exposed to the latest state of that tech? To me your answer seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the "AI hype" but if you look at how things evolved over the past year, there's a clear indication that these issues will get ironed out, and the next iterations will be better in every way. I wonder, at that point, where the goalposts will be moved...

globular-toast 2y ago

I've been trying to add high quality elevation data to the maps on my blog. I'm way out of my depth trying to convert things from one format to another. There are seemingly endless ways to store the data and a bunch of acronyms (DEM, DTM, DSM, SRTM etc.) Anyway, I resorted to ChatGPT to help. It gave me a complete end to end process, including how to install tools, that was almost entirely wrong at every step. But, in one step it pointed me towards a tool I didn't know about, and that too finally plugged the gap I needed. I was able to do this because I treat ChatGPT like any other source of knowledge: with a healthy dose of scepticism. Almost everything I do is piecing together knowledge from different sources, written at different levels for different audiences etc. What worries me is whether kids are going to miss out on this. Seeing a fully typeset document or listening to pristine audio of someone who intentionally sounds so confidently correct seems like it will really fuck with their ability to discern the truth. They'll either believe everything, or they'll believe nothing. What worries me even more is these models are controlled by an oligopoly who twist and bend them to fit their own beliefs and narratives. Instead of going to the public library children will be getting knowledge filtered through layers of "AI" that will never tell them anything it's not supposed to tell them.

guy234 2y ago

This article could be improved by deleting the emojis from it.

pknerd 2y ago

Thanks for sharing. Does NotebookLM covers other languages as well, for instance Urdu, arabic or Farsi?

lemming 2y ago
Right now the podcasts are only in English, and (I believe) only use English sources. I'm sure this will change soon enough though.
- Kurtz79 2y ago
  I fed it an Italian Wikipedia entry and it generated a (relevant) podcast and summaries in English, so at least the input seem to support multiple languages even if the output is in English. If I had come across something like this 2/3 years ago it would have looked like magic, but even now it’s quite impressive. Edit: You can change the language following the indications in the FAQ; after that, text generation seems to be in the configured language, but the podcast is still in English.
- tkgally 2y ago
  I gave it a book in Japanese that I wrote and it generated an accurate podcast about it in English.

lexandstuff 2y ago

The NotebookLM podcast feature is so unbelievably good! I've been feeding it random papers I've always wanted to read, and it's giving me these entertaining high-level summaries. The banter is almost addictive. Also, reading the papers in detail is quite easy after you understand the topics.

namaria 2y ago
Language model summaries can change meaning in hard to detect ways unless you're a very knowledgeable specialist.
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  So does your brain.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
qlm 2y ago
I fed it a pretty short article (~8000 words), and multiple times it said literally the exact opposite of what the article stated or made parts up entirely. I'd suggest reading and understanding whatever you give it because it will almost certainly lead you astray.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  And even when it is technically right it often goes off on tangents not in the paper -- for instance I fed it one of my papers on a pipeline to analyze microbiome data and it spent half of the "podcast" on talking about how important the microbiome is to health and how health care needs to take the microbiome in mind. All true, but it doesn't have to do with the pipeline! That being said, I'm blown away by how realistic the voices are and how they often interrupt and talk over each other the way that real human podcasters do.

gammacine 2y ago

It’s crazy how good NotebookLM is at summarizing information. I've been using it non-stop to quickly get through a pile of articles I usually put off, and it’s honestly freeing up so much time. It's not just the saving time part but it feels like I'm actually getting more out of what I read. Makes me wonder what we'll be able to do with this kind of technology in the next few years!

foobarbecue 2y ago

Tectonic, not "techtonic." And poor kid, being fed this AI sludge. If you want to teach an 8-year-old about subduction, use the Magic School Bus!

tkellogg 2y ago
lolololol, no that's me. I don't use AI at all while writing, which is why I make these mistakes
- foobarbecue 2y ago
  I also find that words I type commonly (e.g. "tech"), get so wired into muscle memory, that they sometimes show up where they don't belong!

leegen_1 2y ago

On a parallel note - came across this damn useful use case of NotebookLM : atomicideas.ai - creating engaging audiobooks from the book summaries. Is NotebookLM the most innovative AI product from Google in the GenAI space?

bsenftner 2y ago
Note sure about what I think of the ethics of what Atomicideas 2.0 is doing: taking classic literature and making that a Q&A chatbot, for a fee.

supernova87a 2y ago

Wow, I honestly was not intending to click through and pay much attention to TFA, but I pressed "play" just to see, and I was honestly immediately hooked. Maybe because I'm saturated with LLM stories, and yet another summarization use case, blah blah blah. There is something fascinating here to me that two (synthetic) people talking to each other engaged my attention, and then amazement that they were turning this esoteric paper into a radio show at the popular level. (or for any paper whose content would never actually warrant two real people making a radio show about it, if you could even pay them to do so) Maybe an aspect of it is that if two people are talking about something, it inherently has passed a filter that "it might be interesting" to know about. Surprisingly eye opening about the technology here.

parkaboy 2y ago

This is amazing. Would love an actual geophysicist to chime in to verify how accurate this was. I really felt like I learned something...but did I?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tivert 2y ago

[originally posted to a previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41696561] Honestly, the resulting "podcast" is kind of underwhelming as an actual artifact. It's basically "plate tectonics for kids" mixed with some gobbledygook from the input paper. Sure it's kind of neat as a tech demo, but to actually try to use that just show the mediocritizing to enshittfying influence of LLMs. Honestly, I think the guy would have gotten an even better response from his kid from any competently done "plate tectonics for kids" video (e.g. from Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/middle-school-earth-and-space-science/x87d03b443efbea0a:the-geosphere/x87d03b443efbea0a:plate-tectonics/v/introduction-to-plate-tectonics https://www.khanacademy.org/science/middle-school-earth-and-...). Curation and digital distribution basically solved this problem earlier with better results. LLMs are just a shittier private label article factory version (https://blog.smashwords.com/2010/01/scam-of-private-label-articles.html https://blog.smashwords.com/2010/01/scam-of-private-label-ar...).