Steven Johnson is a very meta author. He frequently writes about science and technology and likes to dive into the topics he discusses, even using them to change the way he writes books. A couple of years ago, a few months before ChatGPT was released and the rise of ai took over the tech world, Johnson ai-language.html”>I got a magazine job That sent him very, very deep down the ai rabbit hole, and he never came back out.
Now, in addition to writing books, Johnson also works at Google. He is part of the team developing a product called NotebookLM — “Notebook,” as the team calls it. It’s a tool for note-taking and research: You upload documents and import web links, and Notebook’s artificial intelligence, powered by Gemini, helps you organize things, extract information, and better understand a topic. “They reached out to me,” Johnson says when I ask how he got involved with Google, “and they said, ‘Hey, you’ve been dreaming of this ideal software tool to help you organize your thoughts, write, make connections, and brainstorm. We think we can do that now.’” Johnson signed up and has been at Google since summer 2022.
The product itself first launched in 2023 as Project Tailwind, and has since been significantly revamped and expanded. Last week, the team launched Audio Overviews, which generates a podcast (with two chatty hosts, lots of back-and-forth, and a truly notable penchant for the phrases “dig deeper” and “buckle up”) based on the insights you provide. It’s fascinating, it’s complicated, and it’s improving very quickly.
In This episode of The VergecastJohnson joins us to talk about his fascination with ai, his time at Google, and the present and future of NotebookLM. We talk about the difficult problems that a tool like this poses and whether it's okay to let an ai do your research and homework.
We also talk about how to make sure a tool like NotebookLM is accurate and easy to verify, why context windows are more important to the future of ai than most people realize, and how often ai podcast hosts should say “like” in conversation. And we talk about Johnson’s own process as a writer and creator, and how ai is changing the way he works.
If you want to learn more about everything we discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
