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 checklist of issues which have amazed me not too long ago.
Are we digital but?
I’m removed from the primary particular person 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 latest posts, “Suppose Higher” and “Henry Ford Does AI.” Each the abstract and prompt questions NotebookLM supplied have 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 strategies 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.
Being Google, after the preliminary expertise, the consumer interface was greater than a bit clunky. Once I needed 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 want 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 accessible in beta. Beta is true—there’s clearly rather a lot happening right here that’s harmful and simply abusable. Nevertheless it’s additionally loads of enjoyable, and it factors towards a brand new path for AI growth.
In essence (and I’ll have the essence flawed), laptop use lets you inform Claude methods to use a pc: browsers, editors, shells, something that may have a consumer interface on a display screen (and presumably extra). Anthropic offers a demo as a Docker container, so you’ll be able to run it safely. As soon as the container is operating, you may give Claude an issue to unravel; it’s going to work out methods to clear up that drawback, 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 press, 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 enable internet shopping 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 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 reasonably than essential. It’s straightforward for Claude to be misled into decoding one thing on a random web site as a immediate. It is going to be a subject day for immediate injection assaults. And I can think about loads of enhancements. Pc use at present works by taking screenshots and transport them to Claude, which computes the place to click on. That appears extremely awkward, particularly on condition that many purposes have accessibility affordances that may make the screenshotting pointless.
For now, chill out and take a breath. Don’t use laptop use for something critical but—it’s necessary to heed Anthropic’s many warnings. However you need 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.
May this be the top of CRM?
Considerably alongside the identical traces: Sam Lessin posted on Twitter (I gained’t name it X) a few 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 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 supply 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 consists of conversations with hundreds 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. E mail is my CRM system; I’ve by no means used a industrial CRM product.
Sadly and paradoxically, Gmail’s skill to go looking 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 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 immediately into Gmail. They have already got all the information.
That’s it for this month. That wasn’t so dangerous—possibly I ought to do that extra typically.
