Exhibit A: Google’s NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a analysis instrument the corporate launched with little fanfare a 12 months in the past. A number of weeks in the past, Google added an AI podcasting instrument known 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 increase your ego for 9 minutes. The characteristic has change into a shock viral hit. I wrote about all of the bizarre and wonderful methods persons are utilizing it right here.
To present you a style, I created a podcast of our One hundred and twenty fifth-anniversary journal challenge. The AI does an amazing job of choosing some highlights from the journal and supplying you with the gist of what they’re about. Have a hear beneath.
Multimodal generative content material has additionally change 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 right this moment’s know-how, these movies look clunky and foolish. Meta simply introduced its competitor to OpenAI’s Sora, known as Film Gen. The instrument permits customers to make use of textual content prompts to create customized movies and sounds, edit current movies, and make photos into movies.
The best way we work together with AI programs can also be altering, turning into much less reliant on textual content. OpenAI’s new Canvas interface permits customers to collaborate on tasks 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 end result, Canvas permits folks to pick bits of textual content or code to edit.
Even search is getting a multimodal improve. Along with inserting adverts 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 net 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 plenty of various kinds of supply materials. NotebookLM was the primary AI product shortly that introduced me surprise and delight, partly due to how totally different, practical, and sudden the AI voices have been. However the truth that NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews turned a success regardless of being a facet characteristic hidden inside a much bigger product simply goes to point out that AI builders don’t actually know what they’re doing. Exhausting to consider now, however ChatGPT itself was an sudden hit for OpenAI.
We’re a few years into the multibillion-dollar generative AI increase. The large 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 underneath to generate profits and ship. Tech corporations are throwing totally different AI instruments at folks and seeing what sticks.
Deeper Studying
AI-generated photos can educate robots how you can act
