Welcome to the Virgcast, the flagship podcast of Infinite Context Windows.

I'm your friend David Pierce and this is the first episode in our new mini series all

about AI and real life. We did a few episodes on this

subject earlier this year and it continues to be a thing that we're talking and

thinking a lot about. For all the big heady talk of how AI will either change everything or kill

us all or make nobody ever have to work again or make us all have to work training robots,

what is any of this actually good for like right now? That's what we've been trying to figure out.

For today's episode I'm talking with Stephen Johnson who is a personal favorite author of mine. He's written 14 books over the years and he actually

told me that he can name them all in order off the top of his head which I believe and

also find very impressive. And some of those books are books you've probably heard of, like where good ideas come from and how we got to now.

But in addition to all of that, Stephen has also spent the last two years working at Google on a project called notebook

LM. Notebook LM, if you've never heard of it, is an experimental thing out of a

team called Google Labs. It started out as a thing called Project

Tailwind a couple of years ago,

and the idea has always been to make an AI-powered tool basically for making sense of your notes.

In Notebook LM, which they all call Notebook, so I'll just start calling it notebook.

You first upload a bunch of documents

or links to websites or PDFs or whatever else,

and the tool builds sort of a corpus of stuff.

The idea is you put a bunch of related things into a notebook in notebook.

Then you can ask questions about those documents, or you can have notebook build you an automatic study guide or an FAQ of the information in those documents.

You can have it find you stuff in those documents, all that kind of stuff.

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