Yesterday I wrote a post about Open NotebookLM, an open-source version of Google’s NotebookLM, which has become a bit of an internet sensation.
Today I thought I’d share a comparison of the two. NotebookLM is available from Google and Open NotebookLM is hosted at Hugging Face.
I uploaded a PDF of an article I co-authored a few years go: Rowe, M., Nicholls, D. A., & Shaw, J. (2022). How to replace a physiotherapist: Artificial intelligence and the redistribution of expertise. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 38(13), 2275–2283.
I asked both NotebookLM and Open NotebookLM: “What are the implications of task redistribution in the context of this article?”
Audio outputs
NotebookLM (from Google)
Open NotebookLM (open source)
Quick thoughts
- NotebookLM is incredible. It’s not the conversation I would have had, but it’s pretty amazing considering you don’t have too much control over the output. The suggested questions are pretty good, and generate interesting insights from the article.
- I wasn’t that impressed with the output of OpenNotebookLM, even without comparing it to NotebookLM. I was expecting a more realistic conversation / transcript, with more detail from the article. This says something about how much my expectations have changed over the last few months. A year ago I would have thought that even this was some kind of dark magic.
- Open NotebookLM generated much shorter audio than NotebookLM (2.5 minutes compared to almost 13 minutes). This is a reflection of Google’s bottomless pit of money they can throw at the problem. You may be able to change this if you’re running Open NotebookLM locally.
That last point is important. The option of running Open NotebookLM on your own computer is going to be a game-changer. When I can give generative AI models that live on my computer, access to all my context (files, calendar, email, etc), it’s going to revolutionise how I work. I don’t know if I’m ever going to give Google that level of access. And it’s not because I don’t trust them (although that will be an issue for many people).
In my case, there’s a part of me that will never trust Google to keep their products around. I’ve been burned too many times when they’ve decided to sunset a project that I’d put significant time and energy into. I’ll probably use NotebookLM for isolated projects but there’s no way I’m going to start using this as any kind of actual notebook for anything I care about.
Which is why, even though Open NotebookLM is miles behind Google’s product, I kind-of prefer it.