very 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!
NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
91–100 of 148 posts
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#92A new prototype from Gogle for collecting user data and will be dumped anytime soon once it collects enough data or it fails.
Woof. 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.
Take a look at Instagram's Threads. They had 100M users in a few days. Do you think people around the world really care about data being used?
On a related note, I am sad about the state of HN comments, which resembles Reddit more and more.
The blog post specifically mentions the data is private and won't be used to train models, which can't be said about the ChatGPT based tools which do this, but yet, here we have people not bothering to read and just write a cliched comment about "collecting user data".
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#93Google 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 product…
> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades
I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it.
Here’s the official changelog:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272
Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years.
Take July 2019 to July 2020, for instance. In over a year, the only changes of note were: editing headers and footers, an accessibility fix, word count, page numbers, and dark mode on Android. Does that sound like a flagship product from a trillion dollar multinational “going strong”? Or does it sound like a paralysed project with a few interns keeping things ticking over?
And it was worse in the times before that changelog started. That’s hardly “going strong”, that’s surviving on life support. Sure, they never actually killed it and they restarted development once alternatives like Notion started becoming popular, but Google have completely lost interest in Google Docs before and they could do it again – they don’t have the two decade track record you are making them out to have.
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#94Is 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...
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#95Google 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 product…
> Google Docs has been going strong for almost 2 decades I have to disagree here. There have been long stretches of time where it’s appeared to be a mothballed project with virtually no user-visible changes happening to it. Here’s the official changelog: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/9228272 Barely anything happened mid 2019–2021. It looked like a product in maintenance mode for years. Take July 2019 to July…
For whatever its worth, I worked near docs during that time, and that support note elides a lot of the launches that happened. The big focus during that time was on Office compatibility, and so there were a lot of investment in things that were not end-user visible, but allowed for better coexistence in mixed environments.
A massive launch in terms of impact and usage was the ability to directly edit word documents in docs instead of converting. This also extended to sheets and slides, and so was a major focus.
So - totally agree that there were not a lot of shiny user-facing features during that time, but there was a huge engineering investment going on based on a particular strategy that just didn't show itself sirectly in the UI.
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#96I 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 mon…
People are wary about Google product launches because of a well documented[1] pattern of corporate behaviour[2] when it comes to either the project's planning and execution, resourcing, or long-term support. You don't have to agree with those comments, but they are legitimate concerns being expressed by people who have been burned enough times by the company that it has developed a degree[3] of notoriety[4] for it as…
Like I mentioned, don’t use google products then. What’s the value of spamming this all of the time? The validity of the concern isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that it’s irrelevant to the content being posted.
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are wary about Google product launches because of a well documented[1] pattern of corporate behaviour[2] when it comes to either the project's planning and execution, resourcing, or long-term support. You don't have to agree with those comments, but they are legitimate concerns being expressed by people who have been burned enough times by the company that it has developed a degree[3] of notoriety[4] for it as…
Like I mentioned, don’t use google products then. What’s the value of spamming this all of the time? The validity of the concern isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that it’s irrelevant to the content being posted.
To warn users so they're aware that the lifespan of the product they're using may be very short, and therefore they may lose something they put a lot of investment in. It's empathy.
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like I mentioned, don’t use google products then. What’s the value of spamming this all of the time? The validity of the concern isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that it’s irrelevant to the content being posted.
To warn users so they're aware that the lifespan of the product they're using may be very short, and therefore they may lose something they put a lot of investment in. It's empathy.
Shall every post for every company be spammed with irrelevant content about questionable actions conducted by said companies?
Why not just submit a post about that directly and let that be the topic of discussion?
Do you see how this entire thread is irrelevant to the submitted post? Do you see the problem?
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#99I 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 mon…
+1. It's labeled as an experiment, of course it might shut down.
Gmail was in "beta" for 5 years after its public launch-- those labels aren't really useful.
Re: NotebookLM: An AI Notebook
#100“ 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?