Steven Johnson is not your average author and TV presenter. Not only has he written 13 books on topics ranging from a London cholera outbreak to the value of video games, he’s also a podcast host and keynote speaker. But that’s not all – for over a year, he’s been a full-time employee of Google, working on something groundbreaking.
He’s been developing something called NotebookLM, an AI collaborator that guides you through your project. It was soft-launched earlier this year and is now available to everyone as part of an experiment. This is Google’s way of testing how the app behaves and how we behave with the app.
Johnson’s journey to Google was fueled by his lifelong passion for software. He was obsessed with HyperCard in college and later became an enthusiast of Scrivener, a popular tool for book authors. When he got access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator in 2021, he realized that AI could take thought tools to a whole new level. Little did he know that Google had similar large language models and was working on a project aligned with his thinking.