Between trip, end-of-year initiatives, the approaching holidays, and different hysteria, I haven’t give you an article this month. So right here’s a fast listing of issues which have amazed me lately.
Are we digital but?
I’m removed from the primary individual to search out NotebookLM superb, and I actually received’t be the final. I did a easy experiment: I pointed it at two of my latest posts, “Suppose Higher” and “Henry Ford Does AI.” Each the abstract and urged questions NotebookLM offered had been fairly good: They went past merely commenting on the 2 items and bought 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 number 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 in all probability discover a couple of issues to complain about.
Study quicker. Dig deeper. See farther.
Being Google, after the preliminary expertise, the consumer interface was greater than a bit clunky. After I needed to return to the podcast a couple of days later, I needed to play “guess what to click on” means an excessive amount of. (Trace: Would you guess that it’s essential to click on on “Pocket book Information”? Why doesn’t the podcast participant seem by default?) However that’s actually a really minor drawback.
Fashions utilizing computer systems
Anthropic’s laptop use API is now out there in beta. Beta is correct—there’s clearly quite a bit occurring right here that’s harmful and simply abusable. But it surely’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 mistaken), laptop use means that you can inform Claude the best way to use a pc: browsers, editors, shells, something that may have a consumer interface on a display (and presumably extra). Anthropic gives a demo as a Docker container, so you possibly can run it safely. As soon as the container is operating, you can provide Claude an issue to unravel; it would determine the best way to resolve that drawback, and use the container’s digital Linux laptop to do the work. For instance, you could possibly 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 “Huge deal, I can add a file to GPT and use it to browse the online for me.” In precept that’s true, though ChatGPT doesn’t permit net searching and file importing in the identical dialog. What’s actually new? Take into consideration the monstrous immediate you’d have to get GPT to learn a spreadsheet, discover out what knowledge was lacking, search for that knowledge 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 slightly than important. 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 area 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 functions have accessibility affordances which may make the screenshotting pointless.
For now, loosen up and take a breath. Don’t use laptop use for something critical but—it’s vital 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 net functions, Selenium++? A software 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 tip of CRM?
Considerably alongside the identical traces: Sam Lessin posted on Twitter (I received’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 discuss to? Why? What are the subjects we talked about? That’s all helpful info.
Sam argues that that is the tip of structured buyer relationship administration (CRM) software program. I received’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 hundreds of individuals. So once 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 out. E-mail is my CRM system; I’ve by no means used a industrial CRM product.
Sadly and sarcastically, Gmail’s means to look is kind 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 very good startup thought, 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 corporations—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 information.
That’s it for this month. That wasn’t so dangerous—perhaps I ought to do that extra usually.
