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The NotebookLM podcast feature is so unbelievably good! I've been feeding it random papers I've always wanted to read, and it's giving me these entertaining high-level summaries. The banter is almost addictive. Also, reading the papers in detail is quite easy after you understand the topics.

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Language model summaries can change meaning in hard to detect ways unless you're a very knowledgeable specialist.

So does your brain.

I fed it a pretty short article (~8000 words), and multiple times it said literally the exact opposite of what the article stated or made parts up entirely. I'd suggest reading and understanding whatever you give it because it will almost certainly lead you astray.

And even when it is technically right it often goes off on tangents not in the paper -- for instance I fed it one of my papers on a pipeline to analyze microbiome data and it spent half of the "podcast" on talking about how important the microbiome is to health and how health care needs to take the microbiome in mind. All true, but it doesn't have to do with the pipeline! That being said, I'm blown away by how realistic the voices are and how they often interrupt and talk over each other the way that real human podcasters do.

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