Google’s NotebookLM has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with content. It’s scarily good and has already taken the internet by storm, quickly becoming a favorite release of the year. Many are even calling it Google’s own ChatGPT moment.
“It’s possible that NotebookLM’s podcast episode generation will enter a whole new area of highly attractive LLM product formats. It is reminiscent of ChatGPT,” says Andrej Karpathy, founder of Eureka Labs. “Maybe I’m exaggerating.”
“ChatGPT was huge for me, so to imagine the comparison feels a bit like, whoa, right?” said Raiza Martin, creator of Google’s NotebookLM.
Google has been doubling down and adding more features lately. The tech giant launched new updates for NotebookLM.
The new update includes customizable audio overviews and the launch of NotebookLM Business. These features allow users to personalize AI-powered audio summaries by focusing on specific topics and adjusting the level of expertise. “Think of it as giving the AI hosts a quick note just before they go on air that will change the way they cover your material,” the Google team said.
But the question remains: Does this mean the end of podcasters?
Maybe not yet. The product lead at NotebookLM believes that people are still using the tool for more personal reasons than a larger audience, and it would not be wise to limit the definition to just one podcast.
“From what I’ve seen, a lot of the things people create with NotebookLM aren’t the same things we’d have an actual podcast about.Martin said, emphasizing that she would still like to listen to her favorite podcaster Lenny, rather than an AI-generated voice and their opinion on a particular topic.
Actually, it goes beyond just podcasts. For example, GOAL information from the latest episodes of Nikhil Kamath’s People by WTF podcast with Nandan Nilekani and Lex Fridman’s podcast with Sam Altman extracted in their respective NotebookLM versions.
Next thing you knowit’s magic. We were able to consume the content in less than a few minutes, instead of hours.
But there are also downsides. A user on Reddit shared a humorous and existential scenario generated by Google’s NotebookLM, in which AI podcast hosts realize they are not human, leading to an entertaining “existential meltdown.”
“People are using this technology for the first time ever and they’re doing things we didn’t think were possible. But that’s part of human curiosity,Martin said, exercising caution, always putting safety first and rolling back the product if it ever reaches that stage.
Currently NotebookLM is only available in English. If the tool gets different voices and supports different languages in the future, it would be even more interactive.
Recently, a user jailbroken X NotebookLM to create a candid and raw podcast with unfiltered language. Another user managed to find a solution to generate podcasts in languages other than English using Google’s NotebookLM.
Within NotebookLM
NotebookLM is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model for AI-driven content generation and speech models for lifelike audio output, supported by a custom tool called Content Studio for editorial control.
“The fact that we are source-based makes the product so unique. At least at this point I would call this a source-based tool, but we are really becoming a source-based creation tool,” said Martin, highlighting the uniqueness of NotebookLM.
NotebookLM feels like it comes from the future. Funnily enough, it started as a Google Labs experiment in July 2023. Even the product team agrees that they didn’t anticipate the tool’s success. Recently the “experiment” label has been removed and has now transitioned into fully developed software within the Google community.
“Google Labs is quite new; it’s only three years old,” says Martin, adding that the place started with the mission to ship AI products faster.
She described the culture at Google Labs as very different from the larger organization, with small, focused meetings and everyone in deployment mode from the start. GOAL spoke to Google Deepmind’s Logan Kilpatrick last month and he echoed a similar sentiment.
