Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?

    Ok so I'm going on a walk. I'll dump a link to a Hacker News   
    discussion about an article. 
    You have to read the article and the discussion and walk me thru   
    all the interesting details, nugget by nugget, and move on when 
    I'm ready for the next piece.

    ok, Great show me the link, I'm waiting.

    Ok I pasted it. Now go.

    I want to understand this more deeply. So instead of you just telling me
    everything, lay out the problem and a question for me to think about, and 
    I'll try to answer. Even if I answer wrong, you should resist giving me the
    answer, and instead keep digging with more questions, so that I eventually 
    arrive at the answer myself.

>hack

>podcast slop

>letting the llm do it for you

there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him

i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.

I wondered when the name change was coming because this is Google: products be endlessly repackaged and renamed, some only to be killed later.

  > products be endlessly repackaged

Banana Paper was on the shortlist

Bard was a great name.

I've seen this sort of thing happen when something starts small and no one cares and then it gets traction. Eg: If you have a tiny toy project that the engineers call one thing, you might publish it under that name. If it then gets the attention of some higher level marketing team, you might rebrand it to align with the rest of the company.

No idea if that happened here or in google generally.

I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.

Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.

Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.

They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.

Google seems to have competing orgs especially when something becomes a company-wide priority. Before it was chat apps, now it's AI. Idk if it's intentional, but it did seem that way with Jetski vs Gemini CLI, where they decided Jetski was better and nixed the other. Also ChromeOS vs Android.

In my experience (since Notebook is still in the name), you're going to get the same emails as before, now with additional people confused about the change and what it means for them.

Wave. That was more of a tech preview though I guess.

The new chat interface in google meets is hilariously bad. Doesn't even load half the time.

Allo?

My response is going to be about Gemini generally and less about NotebookLM.

Google's last frontier model release was Gemini 3.1 Pro, which was in February of this year[1]. At the time, it was ahead of the (at the time) flagship models of Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.2/5.3. From my recollection of the time, it was the best model in the world.

Anthropic released Opus 4.5 Nov '25, 4.6 in Feb '26, 4.7 in April, 4.8 in (late) May. Then Fable in June. 4.7 beat 3.1 Pro on multiple metrics. Fable eats it for breakfast. However, I want to note the 3 month gap between those first two Opus versions.

OpenAI released 5.2 Dec '25, 5.3 Codex Feb '26, 5.3 Instant Mar, 5.4 Mar, 5.5 (late) May, 5.6 July. 5.4 beats 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks[2], seems to be similar/losing on non-agentic. 5.5 seems stronger than 3.1 Pro[3].

Gemini 3.5 Pro is alleged to be launching within the week. Why do I type this all out? Because I think Google is getting a bad rap. They are delayed on a frontier release by a month or two and are being regarded as if they cannot release frontier models. I think their last release demonstrates strength and we need to see a weak release before we call them "behind" (in any reasonable sense). These companies swap back and forth constantly. I recall a multi-month span where 2.5 Pro was just the best thing out there by a large margin (in my opinion).

[1]: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...

[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7

[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8

My wild guess is Google isn’t willing to play as dirty as the others wrt data acquisition.

I was still using Gemini CLI even though Claude is better, just cause of inertia. Then one day it started refusing to work, saying I need to install Antigravity instead. Idk if that's an IDE or has a leaner CLI, but doesn't matter, I'm gone. I don't care how the sausage is made, don't randomly break the thing I'm using.

I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.

Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.

Antigravity sucks so bad that I have started to feel that google really doesn't wanna compete, they just wanna hang in there at number 2 or 3, to just annoy the number 1 and 2.

Also enshittification is slowly starting. Yesterday I asked Gemini (in the Android app) for a recommendation for an app for sound recording. Instead of it answering I got a popup to allow Gemini access to open the app store (or something like that, I didn't allow it). When I declined it just stopped the conversation. It was actually hard to get it to just reply with a list of apps. And I have an AI subscription with Google!

Yeah, it grinds my gears. They could probably have lightning speed inference and the best model if they were interested in doing so.

But they renamed Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI. And it's worse.

Apparently it is Language Model, as mentioned in the announcement of NotebookLM in 2023 [0].

> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.

It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.

[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/notebook...

Language model?

Large model?

Learning machine?