Between trip, end-of-year tasks, the approaching holidays, and different hysteria, I haven’t give you an article this month. So right here’s a fast record of issues which have amazed me lately.
Are we digital but?
I’m removed from the primary individual 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 latest posts, “Assume Higher” and “Henry Ford Does AI.” Each the abstract and recommended questions NotebookLM offered 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 in all probability discover a number of issues to complain about.
Study sooner. Dig deeper. See farther.
Being Google, after the preliminary expertise, the consumer interface was greater than a bit clunky. Once I wished to return to the podcast a number of days later, I needed to play “guess what to click on” means an excessive amount of. (Trace: Would you guess that you’ll 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 out there in beta. Beta is true—there’s clearly rather a lot happening right here that’s harmful and simply abusable. Nevertheless it’s additionally quite a lot of enjoyable, and it factors towards a brand new route for AI growth.
In essence (and I could have the essence incorrect), laptop use means that you can inform Claude how one can 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 possibly can run it safely. As soon as the container is working, you can provide Claude an issue to unravel; it should work out how one can remedy that downside, and use the container’s digital Linux laptop to do the work. For instance, you can ask it to fill out a spreadsheet with knowledge 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 knowledge was lacking, search for that knowledge 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 reasonably than important. It’s straightforward for Claude to be misled into decoding one thing on a random web site as a immediate. Will probably 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, calm down 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 functions, Selenium++? A device 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 strains: Sam Lessin posted on Twitter (I gained’t name it X) a few very intelligent and helpful hack. He exported a few years of e-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 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 a long time, and my e-mail consists of conversations with 1000’s of individuals. So once I wish to ask a query like “I wish to perceive extra about DDOS; who ought to I speak to?” my first step is to go to Gmail and begin looking out. Electronic mail is my CRM system; I’ve by no means used a industrial CRM product.
Sadly and paradoxically, Gmail’s means to go looking 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.
Electronic mail-based CRM may even be startup thought, although it’s laborious to think about succeeding long-term. There wouldn’t be a lot of a “moat” to guard a startup in opposition to bigger corporations—like Google itself. I can simply think about Google constructing this sort of AI-enabled search instantly into Gmail. They have already got all the info.
That’s it for this month. That wasn’t so dangerous—possibly I ought to do that extra usually.
