Exhibit A: Google’s NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a analysis instrument the corporate launched with little fanfare a yr in the past. A couple of weeks in the past, Google added an AI podcasting instrument referred to as Audio Overview to NotebookLM, which permits customers to create podcasts about something. Add a hyperlink to, for instance, your LinkedIn profile, and the AI podcast hosts will enhance your ego for 9 minutes. The characteristic has turn into a shock viral hit. I wrote about all of the bizarre and superb methods individuals are utilizing it here.
To provide you a style, I created a podcast of our A hundred and twenty fifth-anniversary journal concern. The AI does a fantastic job of selecting some highlights from the journal and supplying you with the gist of what they’re about. Have a hear under.
Multimodal generative content material has additionally turn into markedly higher in a really brief time. In September 2022, I lined Meta’s first text-to-video mannequin, Make-A-Video. Subsequent to at present’s expertise, these movies look clunky and foolish. Meta simply introduced its competitor to OpenAI’s Sora, referred to as Movie Gen. The instrument permits customers to make use of textual content prompts to create customized movies and sounds, edit current movies, and make photographs into movies.
The best way we work together with AI methods can also be altering, changing into much less reliant on textual content. OpenAI’s new Canvas interface permits customers to collaborate on initiatives with ChatGPT. As an alternative of counting on a conventional chat window, which requires customers to do a number of rounds of prompting and regenerating textual content to get the specified outcome, Canvas permits folks to pick out bits of textual content or code to edit.
Even search is getting a multimodal improve. Along with inserting ads into AI overviews, Google has rolled out a brand new characteristic the place customers can add a video and use their voice to seek for issues. In a demo at Google I/O, the corporate confirmed how one can open the Google Lens app, take a video of fish swimming in an aquarium, and ask a query about them. Google’s Gemini mannequin will then search the online and give you a solution within the type of Google’s AI abstract.
What unites these options is a extra interactive, customizable interface and the power to use AI instruments to a number of various kinds of supply materials. NotebookLM was the primary AI product shortly that introduced me marvel and delight, partly due to how completely different, lifelike, and sudden the AI voices had been. However the truth that NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews grew to become a success regardless of being a aspect characteristic hidden inside an even bigger product simply goes to point out that AI builders don’t actually know what they’re doing. Arduous to imagine now, however ChatGPT itself was an unexpected hit for OpenAI.
We’re a few years into the multibillion-dollar generative AI increase. The massive funding in AI has contributed to speedy enchancment within the high quality of the ensuing content material. However we’ve but to see a killer app, and these new multimodal purposes are a results of the immense strain AI corporations are beneath to generate income and ship. Tech corporations are throwing completely different AI instruments at folks and seeing what sticks.
Deeper Studying
AI-generated photographs can train robots the best way to act