AI makes you more creative, AI Roundtable with Steven Johnson and Grant Lee | E2231
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Today’s show:
We keep hearing about how AI is killing our ability to think, filling our media with slop, and ruining our kids’ ability to learn. It seems the internet is filled with negative sentiment about the future AI is bringing.
Jason is joined by Grant Lee, CEO and co-founder of Gamma, as well as Steven Johnson, editorial director of NotebookLM to tackle these questions on today’s AI roundtable!
Grant and Steven break down how they are using AI to push forward their own productivity as well as their teams. Both say that AI makes you more creative! Steven points out that it helped him write his books by having AI do the “chore work” while he got to focus on the valuable insights and higher level thinking.
One valuable tip was that AI can be used to uncover customer insights in a new medium. Steven and Grant both put customer feedback into an LLM, allowed them to have high level conversations with their whole user base about what features and products they each enjoy. If that isn’t creative, then what is?
Learn about all this and more in today’s roundtable!
Timestamps:
(00:00) Introducing Steven Johnson and Grant Lee!
(10:12) Gusto: Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at https://www.gusto.com/twist
(11:28) How Jason and the TWiST team uses NotebookLM
(12:37) Will AI replace lawyers in startups and VC? Should they?
(16:08) How the Gamma team uses AI understand their consumers
(19:43) Lemon.io: Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://lemon.io/twist
(22:38) How the Google team uses AI to “talk” to their whole user base.
(24:45) Is AI replicating our brains and consciousness?
(28:18) The ways that AI is changing how companies process information.
(30:39) Quo (formerly OpenPhone) gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at http://quo.com/TWiST
(31:43) Jason thinks groupchats are the modern coffee shop for interesting ideas!
(32:48) Why Steven thinks AI makes creatives MORE ORIGINAL
(40:02) HALF of US adults think AI makes you less creative
(43:20) Grant defends using AI for doing research + making business decisions
(45:28) Superforecasting — How to think about your thinking
(53:00) Is education going back to blue books and oral exams?
(56:30) Jevons Paradox and How AI will increase jobs for all!
(59:50) Edison put whale hunters out of business but brought in electricians and movie industry
(1:02:36) Jason coaches his employees to 10x themselves with AI tools to push value
(1:05:54) Jason’s call to join the AI revolution
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(10:12) Gusto: Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at https://www.gusto.com/twist
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(30:39) Quo (formerly OpenPhone) gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at http://quo.com/TWiST
Meta’s Race for Your Face + Google’s Hit A.I. Notebook + HatGPT
This week, Casey reports back from a wild day at Meta Connect, discussing what’s new with Meta’s efforts in artificial intelligence, virtual reality headsets and the Holy Grail — augmented reality glasses. Then, Steven Johnson, a writer and editorial director at Google Labs, stops by to talk about the company’s new hit NotebookLM, which uses A.I. to turn even boring PDFs, such as user manuals and Kevin’s bank records, into chatty, disturbingly good podcasts. Finally, so much happened in tech news this week that we reached for the bucket hat in the latest installment of HatGPT!
Guest:
Steven Johnson, author and editorial director, NotebookLM
Additional Reading:
Meta Unveils New Smart Glasses and Headsets in Pursuit of the Metaverse
A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?
OpenAI Executives Exit as C.E.O. Works to Make the Company For-Profit
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The chatbot becomes the teacher
For the first episode in our new miniseries about the impact of AI in our everyday lives, we chat with Steven Johnson, a longtime author who has spent the last couple of years at Google working on an AI research and note-taking tool called NotebookLM. We talk about whether AI can really help us learn better, how Google has tried to make NotebookLM more accurate and helpful, and whether AI-generated podcasts are the future of learning.
Further reading:
NotebookLM
Steven Johnson’s website / newsletter
From Steven Johnson: Listening To The Algorithm
Google teases Project Tailwind — a prototype AI notebook that learns from your documents
Google’s AI-powered note-taking app is the messy beginning of something great
Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from your notes
Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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a16z Podcast: Beyond Zero Sum, Again
with Marc Andreessen (@pmarca), Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), and Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson)
Continuing our 10-year anniversary series since the founding of Andreessen Horowitz (aka "a16z"), we’re resurfacing some of our previous episodes featuring Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
This episode was actually recorded in 2017 at our annual innovation Summit, and features technology writer Steven Johnson interviewing Ben and Marc about everything from their relationship to creative inspirations.
You can find other episodes in this series at a16z.com/10.
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Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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a16z Podcast: Seeing into the Future -- Making Decisions, Telling Stories
with Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson), Chris Dixon (@cdixon), and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90)
There's a lot of research and writing out there on "thinking fast" -- the short-term, gut, instinctual decisions we make, biases we have, and heuristics we use -- but what about for "thinking slow" -- the long-term decisions we make that both take longer to deliberate and have longer spans of impact on our lives... and the world? Because we're not only talking about decisions like who to marry (or whether to move) here; we're also talking about decisions that impact future generations in ways we as a species never considered (or could consider) before.
But... why bother, if these decisions are so complex, with competing value systems, countless interacting variables, and unforeseeable second- and third-order effects? We can't predict the future, so why try? Well, while there's no crystal ball that allows you to see clearly into the future, we can certainly try to ensure better outcomes than merely flipping a coin, argues author Steven B. Johnson in his new book, Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter Most.
Especially because the hardest choices are the most consequential, he observes, yet we know so little about how to get them right. So in this episode of the a16z Podcast, Johnson shares with a16z crypto general partner Chris Dixon and a16z's Sonal Chokshi specific strategies -- beyond good old-fashioned pro/con lists and post-mortems -- for modeling the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers (and not just oil-company scenario planners, but also storytellers). The decisions we're talking about here aren't just about individual lives and businesses -- whether launching a new product feature or deciding where to innovate next -- they're also about even bigger and bolder things like how to fix the internet, or what message to send aliens with outcomes spanning centuries far into the future. But that's where the power of story comes in again.
The content provided here is for informational purposes only, and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to purchase any investment solution or a recommendation to buy or sell a security; nor it is to be taken as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In fact, none of the information in this or other content on a16zcrypto.com should be relied on in any manner as advice. Please see https://a16zcrypto.com/disclosures/ for further information.
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Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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a16z Podcast: Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking in the Game of Tech... and Life
with Marc Andreessen (@pmarca), Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), and Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson)
The rise of zero-sum thinking -- which has come snapping back recently -- slows and even halts progress, observes Marc Andreessen. Because you're then dividing up a smaller piece, adds Ben Horowitz, instead of growing the pie altogether. This is true not just in economics, politics, and tech, but also in business relationships (and life), too.
And speaking of such relationships, how does the partnership between Ben and Marc work, more than two decades later, how has it changed through different types of organizations -- and is there anything startup co-founders (and other colleagues) can take away from it? Where do they find the creative inspiration, information, and influences for new ideas? And then, more broadly, how do they think about tech change... including jobs, automation, AI in general?
This episode of the a16z Podcast covers these questions and much more. It's based on a fireside chat that took place at our annual a16z Summit event in November 2017 (which brings together large companies, finance investors, academics, and startups to talk all things innovation), and is moderated by author Steven B. Johnson -- who has written numerous magazine articles, 11 books so far (including Where Good Ideas Come From), and also hosted the PBS series “How We Got to Now”. Incidentally, those are the de facto themes for this conversation, which arcs from past to present to future -- taking us from blinking cursors to dashboards to screens and beyond.
Stay Updated:
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Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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Episode 36: Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson is the author of many books, some of which Future Perfect, Where Good Ideas Come from, Mind Wide Open, and How We Got To Now. This episode is all about innovation, where it occurs in our own lives, where it occurs in communities, and how he keeps finding it in his own life. Innovation is one of those terms like "authentic" that has essentially been co-opted. It’s been used so much to describe nearly everything that it’s almost lost its meaning. But Steven’s been writing about innovation for two decades and has interesting and defining things to say about it. Edited by Alex Kontis For any feedback, message me by @eriktorenberg See more Steven Johnson at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/ and message him at @Stevenbjohnson.