🤝 Supercharge your work with NotebookLM
Dear curious mind,
In today's newsletter, I'll show you how to use NotebookLM to chat with books. Moreover, I'm excited to announce a free webinar where I'll dive deeper into practical techniques for thinking, analyzing, and creating with the AI-powered assistance of NotebookLM.
In this issue:
💡 Shared Insight
How NotebookLM Can Help You Make Better Reading Decisions
📰 AI Update
New Claude 3.5 Models Take the Lead
Claude Can Now Use Computers Like a Human
Google's AI Watermarking Tool Is Now Open-Source
🌟 Media Recommendation
Webinar: Use NotebookLM to Think, Analyze, and Create More Effectively
💡 Shared Insight
How NotebookLM Can Help You Make Better Reading Decisions
Time is our most precious resource, and this is especially true when it comes to reading. Think about it: there's only a limited number of books you'll be able to read in your lifetime. Making the right choices about which books to invest your time in becomes crucial, particularly when reading for knowledge rather than pure enjoyment.
This realization led me to develop a new approach: chatting with books before reading them. Instead of diving straight in, I first upload them to AI and start a conversation. And I've found that NotebookLM is the perfect tool for this purpose.
What makes NotebookLM particularly powerful is that it's not only free but, more importantly, it's grounded in the material you upload. When you chat with a book and ask questions, you get direct references to the relevant passages. This feature ensures you're getting accurate insights rather than AI hallucinations.
But here's where it gets even more interesting: NotebookLM can generate natural-sounding podcast episodes from your conversations. I covered this capability in an earlier issue about deep dives, and with the latest release, you can even customize these generations using prompts.
I've developed two approaches for this:
A personal evaluation where I present my specific problems and ask if the book offers solutions
A general summary designed to help anyone decide if the book is worth their time
I started a podcast named “Aidful Book Summaries” and I am going to release one podcast episode per day for the next 100 days. Each episode will provide a general book summary. The used custom prompt to create the episodes has the intention to help you make informed decisions about your reading choices. The first episode is a deep dive into the book “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” by Ethan Mollick. From my perspective, a must-read to prepare yourself for the AI revolution, but judge yourself by listening to the podcast episode.
The podcast is just an easy starting point to get a feel for what's possible. While I encourage you to listen to these episodes, the real power lies in doing this yourself. Create your own conversations with books, ask your own questions, and use this technology to make better reading decisions. I will host a free webinar where I'll show you how to leverage NotebookLM for better reading decisions and knowledge work. Check out the Media Recommendation section below for details on this comprehensive introduction to NotebookLM's capabilities, or go directly to the sign-up form.
In a world where our reading time is limited, having AI as a reading advisor might be the key to making better choices about the books we invest our time in.
📰 AI Update
New Claude 3.5 Models Take the Lead (Anthropic blog)
Anthropic has unveiled its latest AI models, with the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet demonstrating remarkable improvements across multiple benchmarks, notably outperforming OpenAI's GPT-4o. Most impressively, in software engineering tasks, Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieved a score of 49.0% on SWE-bench Verified, surpassing even OpenAI's specialized coding model o1-preview. This positions Sonnet as the new industry leader in AI-powered coding capabilities.
The company also announced Claude 3.5 Haiku, a more cost-effective model set to launch later this month. Despite its lower price point, Haiku promises performance that matches or exceeds many capabilities of the previous generation's top model, Claude 3 Opus, while maintaining similar speed and cost efficiency to its predecessor.
Notably absent from the announcement was any mention of an Opus version in the 3.5 series, leaving questions about whether Anthropic plans to release an update to their most powerful model tier.
Claude Can Now Use Computers Like a Human (Anthropic blog)
The introduction of computer use capabilities for Claude 3.5 Sonnet represents a pivotal moment in AI development that feels both revolutionary and somehow intuitive. Just as humanoid robots are designed to navigate and interact with our physical world built for human bodies - with arms, legs, and hands that match our infrastructure - teaching AI to use computers the way humans do is a remarkably elegant solution for interacting with today digital infrastructure.
Google's AI Watermarking Tool Is Now Open-Source (@GoogleDeepMind on 𝕏)
While spotting AI text is normally hard, watermarking makes it clear and simple. However, small watermark-free models might be used to reformulate generated content and with that remove the watermarking which is based on probabilities of word sequences.
🌟 Media Recommendation
Webinar: Use NotebookLM to Think, Analyze, and Create More Effectively
In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI tools, NotebookLM has emerged as a powerful tool for knowledge workers. What makes it particularly compelling is its unique combination of being completely free while offering capabilities that match or exceed premium alternatives. Its most powerful feature is the ability to ground all conversations in your uploaded content, effectively minimizing AI hallucinations, which are a well-known problem with other tools. Additionally, it can transform written content into natural-sounding podcast episodes, opening up new possibilities for content creation and knowledge sharing.
Through extensive testing and experimentation, I've discovered that NotebookLM will significantly enhance how knowledge workers can interact with their sources. These approaches enable efficient extraction of key insights from books and articles, creation of targeted content summaries for yourself and the generation of engaging podcast episodes.
To share these insights and help others leverage this powerful tool, I'm hosting a free webinar. During this session, I'll give an introduction to NotebookLM, share my workflow for processing books and articles, present my prompting techniques for different use cases, show how to create AI-powered podcast episodes, and reveal best practices for knowledge extraction that I've developed through weeks of usage.
The webinar will take place on November 3rd at 6 PM UTC and will run for 60 minutes on Google Meet. You can sign up for free for my NotebookLM webinar at this Google Form.
After many months of experimenting with various AI tools, I'm convinced that NotebookLM is a game-changer for knowledge workers, and this webinar will help you unlock its full potential and integrate it seamlessly into your daily workflow.
Disclaimer: This newsletter is written with the aid of AI. I use AI as an assistant to generate and optimize the text. However, the amount of AI used varies depending on the topic and the content. I always curate and edit the text myself to ensure quality and accuracy. The opinions and views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the sources or the AI models.