NotebookLM, using Gemini, is a new class of AI software: Google’s Steven Johnson

Mountain View, California: A day ahead of the Google I/O 2025 developer conference keynote, a still rather small team within the tech giant’s fold released its smartphone apps that needed less than 24 hours to become the number 2 most downloaded Productivity app and the number 9 most downloaded app overall, for the Apple App Store worldwide. NotebookLM still elicits some confusion — what sort an AI tool is this, we’re often asked. The answer, Steven Johnson, who is Editorial Director for NotebookLM and Google Labs, suggests is actually rather simple. “The core proposition of NotebookLM from the beginning has been that you give us your sources and we will restrict the model to those,” he says, further illustrating that it can be the ideal methodology for perfectly understanding a complex topic or decoding a lengthy, layered document that would have otherwise taken much longer to read and understand.