Between trip, end-of-year initiatives, the approaching holidays, and different hysteria, I haven’t provide you with an article this month. So right here’s a fast checklist of issues which have amazed me just lately.
Are we digital but?
I’m removed from the primary particular person to seek out NotebookLM superb, and I actually gained’t be the final. I did a easy experiment: I pointed it at two of my current posts, “Assume Higher” and “Henry Ford Does AI.” Each the abstract and instructed questions NotebookLM supplied have been fairly good: They went past merely commenting on the 2 items and acquired into the connection between the 2. However what blew me away was the podcast it generated: an eight-minute dialogue between two artificial individuals who sounded and engaged. (Right here’s an outline of among the strategies Google places to make use of to make it occur.) Was it 100% appropriate? No, however truthfully, if a human summarized my articles, I’d most likely discover a number of issues to complain about.
Study quicker. Dig deeper. See farther.
Being Google, after the preliminary expertise, the consumer interface was greater than a bit clunky. Once I needed to return to the podcast a number of days later, I needed to play “guess what to click on” method an excessive amount of. (Trace: Would you guess that you might want to click on on “Pocket book Information”? Why doesn’t the podcast participant seem by default?) However that’s actually a really minor downside.
Fashions utilizing computer systems
Anthropic’s laptop use API is now accessible in beta. Beta is correct—there’s clearly quite a bit happening right here that’s harmful and simply abusable. But it surely’s additionally plenty of enjoyable, and it factors towards a brand new path for AI improvement.
In essence (and I could have the essence unsuitable), laptop use means that you can inform Claude find out how to use a pc: browsers, editors, shells, something that may have a consumer interface on a display screen (and presumably extra). Anthropic gives a demo as a Docker container, so you may run it safely. As soon as the container is working, you can provide Claude an issue to resolve; it should work out find out how to remedy that downside, and use the container’s digital Linux laptop to do the work. For instance, you would ask it to fill out a spreadsheet with information it collects from web sites. Claude will do all the click, copying, and pasting for you.
Is that this revolutionary? My first response was “Huge deal, I can add a file to GPT and use it to browse the online for me.” In precept that’s true, though ChatGPT doesn’t enable net looking and file importing in the identical dialog. What’s actually new? Take into consideration the monstrous immediate you’d must get GPT to learn a spreadsheet, discover out what information was lacking, search for that information on the internet, and generate a brand new up to date spreadsheet. It wouldn’t be easy. With laptop use, most of that complexity disappears.
Does it actually disappear? We’ll discover out as we get additional in. We’re nonetheless on the stage the place hallucinations and misbehavior are cute relatively than crucial. It’s simple for Claude to be misled into deciphering one thing on a random web site as a immediate. It will likely be a area day for immediate injection assaults. And I can think about loads of enhancements. Pc use at present works by taking screenshots and delivery them to Claude, which computes the place to click on. That appears extremely awkward, particularly provided that many functions have accessibility affordances that may make the screenshotting pointless.
For now, chill out and take a breath. Don’t use laptop use for something critical but—it’s essential to heed Anthropic’s many warnings. However you must play with it and take into consideration what it means. An automatic framework for testing net functions, Selenium++? A software for negotiating with on-line distributors? We’re a lot nearer to an agent-filled world the place we ask a pc what to do and it does it for us.
Might this be the top of CRM?
Considerably alongside the identical traces: Sam Lessin posted on Twitter (I gained’t name it X) a few very intelligent and helpful hack. He exported a few years of electronic mail, used GPT to extract key components, and uploaded it to NotebookLM (sure, once more), which permits him to ask questions on his conversations over the previous decade. Who did I speak to? Why? What are the subjects we talked about? That’s all helpful info.
Sam argues that that is the top of structured buyer relationship administration (CRM) software program. I gained’t supply an opinion for buyers or founders, however his course of resonated with me instantly. I’ve labored with many authors and potential authors over the a long time, and my electronic mail contains conversations with 1000’s of individuals. So once I need to ask a query like “I need to perceive extra about DDOS; who ought to I speak to?” my first step is to go to Gmail and begin looking. E mail is my CRM system; I’ve by no means used a business CRM product.
Sadly and satirically, Gmail’s capacity to go looking is kind of poor. Utilizing it for contact administration, although it may be made to work, isn’t nice. Can I simply ask NotebookLM? Completely.
E mail-based CRM would possibly even be an excellent startup thought, although it’s onerous to think about succeeding long-term. There wouldn’t be a lot of a “moat” to guard a startup towards bigger corporations—like Google itself. I can simply think about Google constructing this type of AI-enabled search instantly into Gmail. They have already got all the info.
That’s it for this month. That wasn’t so unhealthy—possibly I ought to do that extra typically.
