Between trip, end-of-year initiatives, the approaching holidays, and different hysteria, I haven’t provide you with an article this month. So right here’s a fast record of issues which have amazed me not too long ago.
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 current posts, “Suppose Higher” and “Henry Ford Does AI.” Each the abstract and prompt 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 a few 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 person interface was greater than a bit clunky. Once I wished to return to the podcast a couple of days later, I needed to play “guess what to click on” approach 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 downside.
Fashions utilizing computer systems
Anthropic’s pc use API is now accessible in beta. Beta is correct—there’s clearly so much occurring right here that’s harmful and simply abusable. But it surely’s additionally a whole lot of enjoyable, and it factors towards a brand new course for AI growth.
In essence (and I’ll have the essence improper), pc use lets you inform Claude how you can use a pc: browsers, editors, shells, something that may have a person interface on a display (and probably extra). Anthropic offers 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 is going to determine how you can clear up that downside, and use the container’s digital Linux pc to do the work. For instance, you could possibly 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 net looking 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 pc 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 relatively 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 area day for immediate injection assaults. And I can think about loads of enhancements. Laptop use presently works by taking screenshots and transport them to Claude, which computes the place to click on. That appears extremely awkward, particularly provided that many functions have accessibility affordances which may make the screenshotting pointless.
For now, calm down and take a breath. Don’t use pc use for something severe but—it’s vital 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 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 gained’t name it X) a couple of very intelligent and helpful hack. He exported a few years of e-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 subjects we talked about? That’s all helpful data.
Sam argues that that is the tip 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 many years, and my e-mail contains conversations with 1000’s of individuals. So after I need to ask a query like “I need to perceive extra about DDOS; who ought to I speak 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 satirically, Gmail’s capability 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.
E mail-based CRM would possibly even be a superb 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 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 unhealthy—possibly I ought to do that extra usually.