Between trip, end-of-year tasks, 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 individual to seek out NotebookLM wonderful, 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 prompt questions NotebookLM offered had been fairly good: They went past merely commenting on the 2 items and obtained 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 a few of the methods Google places to make use of to make it occur.) Was it 100% appropriate? No, however actually, if a human summarized my articles, I’d most likely discover a couple of issues to complain about.
Study sooner. Dig deeper. See farther.
Being Google, after the preliminary expertise, the person interface was greater than a bit clunky. Once I wished to return to the podcast a couple of days later, I needed to play “guess what to click on” method an excessive amount of. (Trace: Would you guess that you could 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 true—there’s clearly quite a bit happening right here that’s harmful and simply abusable. Nevertheless it’s additionally lots of enjoyable, and it factors towards a brand new route for AI improvement.
In essence (and I’ll have the essence flawed), laptop use means that you can inform Claude how one can use a pc: browsers, editors, shells, something that may have a person interface on a display screen (and probably extra). Anthropic gives a demo as a Docker container, so you may run it safely. As soon as the container is operating, you may give Claude an issue to unravel; it can determine how one can remedy that downside, and use the container’s digital Linux laptop to do the work. For instance, you possibly can 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 “Large deal, I can add a file to GPT and use it to browse the net for me.” In precept that’s true, though ChatGPT doesn’t enable internet searching 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 net, 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 somewhat than crucial. It’s simple for Claude to be misled into decoding one thing on a random web site as a immediate. It will likely be a subject day for immediate injection assaults. And I can think about loads of enhancements. Pc use at the moment works by taking screenshots and delivery them to Claude, which computes the place to click on. That appears extremely awkward, particularly on condition that many purposes have accessibility affordances which may make the screenshotting pointless.
For now, chill out and take a breath. Don’t use laptop use for something severe but—it’s essential to heed Anthropic’s many warnings. However it’s best to play with it and take into consideration what it means. An automatic framework for testing internet purposes, Selenium++? A instrument 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 couple of very intelligent and helpful hack. He exported a few years of electronic mail, used GPT to extract key elements, and uploaded it to NotebookLM (sure, once more), which permits him to ask questions on his conversations over the previous decade. Who did I discuss to? Why? What are the matters we talked about? That’s all helpful data.
Sam argues that that is the top of structured buyer relationship administration (CRM) software program. I gained’t provide an opinion for traders or founders, however his course of resonated with me instantly. I’ve labored with many authors and potential authors over the many years, and my electronic mail contains conversations with 1000’s of individuals. So after I need to ask a query like “I need to perceive extra about DDOS; who ought to I discuss 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 capability to look is sort 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 a great startup concept, although it’s exhausting to think about succeeding long-term. There wouldn’t be a lot of a “moat” to guard a startup in opposition to bigger firms—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.
