Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) / X

Steven Johnson

10K posts

Steven Johnson

@stevenbjohnson

Editorial Director, NotebookLM and Google Labs. Author of 14 books. Latest: The Infernal Machine. Speech inquiries email: wesn at leighbureau dot com

Brooklyn NY & Marin County CA

adjacentpossible.substack.com/about

Joined March 2007

Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Sep 19, 2025
Uh, Matthew, I’d like to introduce you to a little app called @NotebookLM
Jon Hernandez
@JonhernandezIA
Sep 19, 2025
📁 Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Sep 26, 2024
How to do school with NotebookLM: 1. Record audio from class on your phone 2. Keep laptop closed. Just jot down short phrases to describe most important points 3. Upload audio and PDF scan of notes to NotebookLM 4. Ask Notebook to expand your notes with details from recording
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Sep 29, 2024
Thanks @karpathy! We are loving your NotebookLM enthusiasm. We’re just getting started pushing the boundaries of AI user interfaces. So many cool things to build…
Andrej Karpathy
@karpathy
Sep 29, 2024
Deep Dive is now my favorite podcast. The more I listen the more I feel like I'm becoming friends with the hosts and I think this is the first time I've actually viscerally liked an AI. Two AIs! They are fun, engaging, thoughtful, open-minded, curious. ok i'll stop now.
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Apr 27, 2021
One of the best tricks for thinking long-term is to ask yourself: if a newspaper came out once a century, what would the headline be? To me, the answer is clear: we doubled the length of the average human life and reduced child mortality by a factor of 10.
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life (Published 2021)
From nytimes.com
Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Sep 30, 2024
Using NotebookLM to remember everything you've read. On Hard Fork I talked about my collection of 8K quotes. I have them in a single notebook which effectively gives me a personalized AI grounded in the most important ideas I've read. Here's how to build your own version... A
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Dec 13, 2024
Major update rolling out today at NotebookLM: a completely new adaptive design; interact with the Audio Overview hosts; and NotebookLM Plus--our premium version with expanded features. Full features below 👇 New flexible "3-panel" interface lets you easily switch between asking
GIF
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Feb 4, 2021
THREAD: If you had to pick one chart to represent the last hundred years or so of the modern age, what would it be? I think it would have to be this one, tracking the changes in global life expectancy from 1900 to today.
Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
May 25, 2021
You may know W. E. B. DuBois as the author of The Souls of Black Folk and the founder of the NAACP. But did you know he was also a data visualization pioneer and invented techniques to understand health inequalities that were decades ahead of their time?
Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Dec 19, 2024
All @NotebookLM users can now join the conversation in Audio Overviews! Just choose "Interactive Mode" to try. I had the hosts discuss one of my books, then made a surprise guest appearance and asked for criticism. After a bit of flattery, they actually had great suggestions.
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Oct 2, 2024
Much appreciated from the NotebookLM team @sama! Full circle in a way because it was my writing about GPT-3 that brought me to Google in the first place.
Karthik Ramasamy
@_cartick
Oct 1, 2024
@sama thinks NotebookLM is really cool! Great job @GoogleDeepMind @demishassabis @JeffDean
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Sep 30, 2024
Fact-checking based on trusted sources is one of NotebookLM's hidden superpowers. We're gonna make this more apparent in the product over time.
Muratcan Koylan
@koylanai
Sep 30, 2024
Replying to @koylanai
This article has been fact checked by uploading the relevant research papers to NotebookLM.
109K
Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Nov 13, 2025
Two big steps towards our vision for @NotebookLM as the ultimate research platform: • Integrating Deep Research, with a set of only-at-Notebook features that let you explore the retrieved sources • Launching a series of Featured Notebooks curated by @GoogleResearch These
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Oct 2, 2024
Wow. Such a great case study in why we designed NotebookLM from the beginning around curated sources It's basically the foundation of the product: curate the information you need the AI to have expertise in—and then transform it into whatever form you want.
Andrej Karpathy
@karpathy
Oct 2, 2024
Over the last ~2 hours I curated a new Podcast of 10 episodes called "Histories of Mysteries". Find it up on Spotify here: open.spotify.com/show/3K4LRyMCP… 10 episodes of this season are: Ep 1: The Lost City of Atlantis Ep 2: Baghdad battery Ep 3: The Roanoke Colony Ep 4: The Antikythera
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Steven Johnson
@stevenbjohnson
Oct 3, 2024
How to Prompt NotebookLM's Interests One thing we hear constantly from users first experiencing Audio Overviews is how good the hosts are at uncovering the interesting bits from their sources. You can elicit that same interest-driven summarization in text chat too. Here's how:
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