Steven Johnson works at Google on the NotebookLM product, a research tool with a long-context window.
This essay ponders what the future of AI might be when long-context becomes more available and might be a useful knowledge assistant. He also reflects on what the future strategies might be for organisations working with AI.
All of which suggests an interesting twist for the near future of AI. In a long-context world, maybe the organizations that benefit from AI will not be the ones with the most powerful models, but rather the ones with the most artfully curated contexts. Perhaps we’ll discover that organizations perform better if they include more eclectic sources in their compiled knowledge bases, or if they employ professional archivists who annotate and selectively edit the company history to make it more intelligible to the model. No doubt there are thousands of curation strategies to discover, if that near future does indeed come to pass. And if it does, it will suggest one more point of continuity between the human mind and a long-context model. What matters most is what you put into it.
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