How NotebookLM Was Made

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hey everyone, we're here today as guests on Latent Space.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
It's great to be here. I'm a long time listener and fan. They've had some great guests on this show before.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
Yeah, what an honor to have us, the hosts of another podcast, join as guests.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:13)
I mean, a huge thank you to Swix and Alessio for the invite. Thanks for having us on the show.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:18)
Yeah, really, it seems like they brought us here to talk a little bit about our show, our podcast.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Yeah, I mean, we've had lots of listeners ourselves, listeners at Deep Dive.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:26)
Oh yeah, we've made a ton of audio overviews since we launched and we're learning a lot.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
There's probably a lot we can share around what we're building next, huh?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:34)
Yeah, we'll share a little bit at least.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:35)
The short version is, we'll keep learning and getting better for you.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:39)
We're glad you're along for the ride.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:41)
So yeah, keep listening.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:41)
Keep listening and stay curious. We promise to keep diving deep and bringing you even better options in the future.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:49)
Stay curious.

**Alessio** (0:52)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO of Residence and Decibel Partners. And I'm joined by Mikos Swicks, founder of SmallAI.

**Swyx** (1:01)
Hey, and today we're back in the studio with our special guest, Raiza Martin. And Usama, I forgot to get your last name, Shafqat? Yes. Okay, welcome.

**Raiza Martin** (1:12)
Hello. Thank you for having us.

**Swyx** (1:14)
So AI podcasters meet human podcasters. Always fun. Congrats on the success of NotebookLM. I mean, how does it feel?

**Raiza Martin** (1:22)
It's been a lot of fun. A lot of it, honestly, was unexpected. But my favorite part is really listening to the audio overviews that people have been making.

**Swyx** (1:29)
Maybe we should do a little bit of intros and tell the story. What is your path into the Google AI org?
Actually, I don't even know what org you guys are in.

**Raiza Martin** (1:39)
I can start. My name is Raiza. I lead the NotebookLM team inside of Google Labs. So specifically, that's the org that we're in. It's called Google Labs. It's only about two years old. And our whole mandate is really to build AI products. That's it. We work super closely with DeepMind. Our entire thing is just like try a bunch of things and see what's landing with users. And the background that I have is really, I worked in payments before this, and I worked in ads right before, and then startups. I tell people, like at every time that I change orgs, I actually almost quit Google. Like specifically, like in between ads and payments, I was like, all right, I can't do this. Like this is like super hard. I was like, it's not for me. I'm like a very zero to one person. But then I was like, okay, I'll try. I'll interview with other teams. And when I interviewed in payments, I was like, oh, these people are really cool. I don't know if I'm like, it's a super good fit with this space, but I'll try it because the people are cool. And then I really enjoyed that. And then I worked on like zero to one features inside of payments and I had a lot of fun. But then the time came again and I was like, oh, I don't know. It's like, it's time to leave. It's time to start my own thing. But then I interviewed inside of Google Labs and I was like, oh darn. Like there's definitely like-

**Swyx** (2:48)
They got you again.

**Raiza Martin** (2:48)
They got me again. And so now I've been here for two years and I'm happy that I stayed because especially with the recent success of NotebookLM, I'm like, dang, we did it. I actually got to do it. So that was really cool.

**Usama Bin Shafqat** (3:02)
Kind of similar, honestly. I was at a big team at Google. We do sort of the data center, supply chain planning stuff. Google has like the largest sort of footprint. Obviously, there's a lot of management stuff to do there. But then there was this thing called Area 120 at Google, which does not exist anymore.
But I sort of wanted to do more to 1 building and landed a role there where we're trying to build a creator commerce platform called Kaia. It launched briefly a couple of years ago. But then Area 120 sort of transitioned and morphed into Labs. And over the last few years, the focus just got a lot clearer. We were trying to build new AI products and do it in the wild and sort of co-create and all of that. So, yeah, we've just been trying a bunch of different things. And this one really landed, which has felt pretty phenomenal.