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Artificial Intelligence is getting amazing

 Artificial Intelligence is all over the news.  I played with ChatGPT when it first appeared, and I was not impressed.  I also played with Google's NotebookLM.  I was intrigued by it. You could then feed in documents from your Google Drive and then ask questions and it would answer based on what it found in your documents.

In the eight months I was away from computers, things changed dramatically.  AI got smarter; and it will continue to evolve.

NotebookLM can can now pull in sources from places outside your Google Drive.  For this example, I chose a Wikipedia article and a YouTube article about the Amazon River.

It took a few minutes and generated an informative summary of the topic.

What was truly amazing was it also generated a podcast about the Amazon, with a man and woman speaking.  Apparently two voices having a conversation are more engaging than one voice lecturing.

A link to a video I made showing the demo is at the end of this post.

Another great use I found almost by accident.  I had a virtual appointment with a Physicians Assistant. With her permission I recorded the audio.

I fed that audio into NotebookLM as the only source.  It generated an accurate overview of the appointment. I wish I could share it with but for privacy reasons I cannot. 

A different doctor seemed almost frightened by my request to record our meeting which is too bad. I wish I'd been able to record all the doctor interactions I had while sick.  Instead of having to listen to hours of recordings, I could ask questions of NotebookLM and get answers based on what it "heard" in my doctor appointments.

When I first owned a computer capable of word processing, just two years after I graduated college, I wished I could start college over. Word processing would have made it infinitely easier and more productive.  I am feeling that again with AI.  Imagine taking everything you are presented in a course, audio of lectures, scans of text books, scientific outlines found online, and having it all distilled down to a rich summary, with timelines, study guide, audio discussions, and using other tools, flash cards.

And you can type in queries and it will answer them based on your source documents.

That being said, AI has been known to hallucinate answers, so take AI's output with grain of salt.  Recently a lawyer got into trouble with the court for using AI to generate a brief.  The AI cited cases it made up.

When I asked AI to help me generate some programming code, it used a command the programming language did not have, so of course the code did not run.

Google's big Developer event, Google IO is next Tuesday. Rumors swirl that it will be heavily oriented with AI announcements, so their might be a follow-on to this post soon.

The video is here.



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