The AI revolution is well underway, and advanced language models like Google’sPaLM 2are at the heart of most recent breakthroughs. Google teased several new machine learning tools atI/O 2023, and the one that got the biggest reaction was something calledProject Tailwind. In a demo, someone’s notes and Google Docs files were used to generate detailed summaries about subjects that were addressed deep within the notes. Now, Google has given the utility has a new name and is finally opening it up to testing.
Now dubbedNotebookLM, Google’s language model can be “grounded” to a set of files you upload to Google Drive — in other words, you select the data it gets trained on. These could be your notes from a class or the various study materials you’ve been given, for example. Once you feed it a set of documents, NotebookLM can summarize the notes, answer specific questions you may have about them, and even generate new ideas.
Students are NotebookLM’s main target demographic, but the tool has potential to be useful in professional settings as well. In addition to summarizing the contents of your notes into easily digestible bullets, Google offered example use-cases like an author uploading research notes and asking the AI to “Summarize all the times Houdini and Conan Doyle interacted,” or an entrepreneur wondering what types of questions an investor might ask after seeing a slideshow about a new product.
To start, Google is making the tool available to only a “small group of testers” in the US. The company says that the only data NotebookLM will be able to access is the set of files you specify in Google Docs, and that it will not use any information gathered to train other AI models. A gradual rollout will help Google ensure that the proper safeguards are in place before expanding availability to another round of users.
