Innovations in Media: Steven Johnson, NotebookLM and collaborating on discovery

Steven Johnson is a prolific and thought-provoking creator of books, podcasts and TV series on technology, history and science. He’s also spent the last four years as a Google employee, helping shape the remarkable NotebookLM AI platform. 

I first learned of Johnson by reading his illuminating book, “The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World.” The book, like most all of his projects, deeply examines a topic with immense curiosity, relentlessly pursuing the who, what, when, where, why and how. 

I later enjoyed his terrific PBS series “How We Got to Now,” a history of innovation. 

Steven Johnson's "Adjacent Possible"Put perhaps most notably, I was thrilled to learn he’s been editorial director and a chief architect of NotebookLM, Google’s “AI-powered research assistant and virtual note-taking app.” The “LM” in the platform name stands for “language model,” a probabilistic AI model that builds sentences by predicting words based on the context of preceding text.

As touted by Google, “Unlike standard AI chatbots that draw on vast, sometimes inaccurate internet knowledge, NotebookLM is designed to base all its answers, summaries, and insights solely on the specific documents and media you upload.” 

NotebookLM truly is remarkable, and I’ve been using it for a variety of projects and tasks, including my own book project. It’s remarkably efficient in helping me find

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