Introduction

I wanted to give this a little bit of a Christmas vibe. So we're going to do some research on Christmas, basically what Christmas is all over the world.

So I just put that plan together a second ago, so give me a sec. What are some things? I want this to be really interactive. What are some things that you would like to know about Christmas itself?

There we go. Somehow that worked. Anything you want to know about Christmas? Go ahead.

Should I speak up? Yeah, speak up.

Discussion Topics

I was saying that maybe how different cultures around the world tend to celebrate. Not every single culture is celebrating in the same manner.

But you might have some sort of facets that other people might have to submit. Difference by culture is one thing.

Age of Christmas

How old is it? How old is it? Age of the celebration.

Why is turkey meat for Christmas? Why is turkey meat for Christmas? Why turkey?

And, um, spelling, I guess. I mean, there are a few things I would like to hear.

History and Traditions

I mean, I want to add one which is just a history. Anything else? Yep.

The crib. Okay. I'm sorry. The mic is having, okay.

Well, I'm trying to figure out where I, where I integrate this is Santa real is going to come in. I'm going to do that by cultural. Okay.

Why was elf on a shelf invented? OK. Elf on a shelf. I'm going to say why. Yep.

Why is mulled wine special? Mulled wine. OK.

Research Strategy

Now, and just to make this a little bit more than Because a lot of this, the large language models obviously are, they have a lot of this incorporated. But I want to make it a little bit recent, because that's going to be important for the rest of the demo.

So I'm going to say 2024 AI ads. I'm going to figure out, because there's been a lot of, yes. What are you going to get for Christmas? It's going to be hard to try and get an answer.

One more, yes. Music. Okay, I'm gonna add one more thing here.

Mind Mapping

Geography, which I had noted down myself on culture. Okay, I'm gonna stop there for a second, right?

We just have like the world's worst written mind map. I don't know if you can make sense of anything I've written down, but I can guarantee you I tried to write down what you all said.

For some people, maybe. Yeah, I have a hard time rereading myself, but I'm happy if it's good for others.

I am just going to take a screenshot here. And then I go back to ChatGPT.

Brainstorming Techniques

Now, hey, we're doing this in a fun thing, in a fun setting. It's all about research on Christmas, but obviously we do a bunch of research on a bunch of topics in our respective professional areas. And the whole idea here is that you can start a brainstorm.

You might actually do this with multiple people in a room. You might do this with post-its in a big room. Rather than having someone actually take all of that and then go painstakingly through writing up those notes, Just take a picture of that whiteboard or of that wall with all the post-its, and then you can do something like this.

Now, imagine you're an experienced exec. Assistant. This is ChatGPT, by the way. If anyone is questioning that at this point in this room, I'd be surprised, but just in case. So imagine you're an experienced exec assistant, expert at taking a mind map and producing a clear brief out of it.

1Following are some notes on everything we would like to know about Christmas. Please build me a research note. walk me through your thinking before answering.

I'm going to add a feature here, which is Canvas. So for those of you that don't know Canvas, it's another way for ChatGPT to put the result into a written type of document. So you will see what comes out.

OK, so now it is going to give me a research note. So it's looking at the mind map that we just created. And it's creating a, whoop, interesting, I should have switched that off.

So it's giving us a breakdown of the brainstorm we just did, just a mind map. But it's a written note that I can now use.

And if you had an hour-long brainstorm, whoever would have been put the task to actually write the notes up of that brainstorm probably would have taken a decent amount of time, whether that's, I don't know, half an hour, 45 minutes to kind of take all of it. You can now do that within a few seconds. Very simple.

Using AI for Research

Then what I'm going to do is another thing here.

It's like now imagine You're an experienced researcher.

Please comment on this note with anything that is missing we would like to know about Christmas that would be out of the ordinary. So this is the thing that maybe not too many of you have seen yet, which is that ChatGPT can now comment on the canvas. And so rather than getting the feedback from the AI as just rewriting whatever answer you have, it is literally now commenting on this document and telling me bit by bit what I think, how I might want to evolve this.

So if you're thinking about actually building out a document, this is a really good way to get going. So here you could explore lesser known folklore or mythical figures related to Santa Claus from other cultures.

Sinterklaas, I'm Dutch. How many of you know Sinterklaas? Yes! Sinterklaas, that was the holiday I really grew up with.

So I'm going to apply this. And that is the beauty. I can literally look at this comment, hit Apply, and it's now going to update the briefing note after having accepted that particular comment.

Commenting and Updating

So think about the dynamic you're looking at here. We started with a brainstorm, got the mind map, got it to comment. I can now accept or decline each of these comments, and it will then update the document based on what I agree or disagree with.

So let's figure out here. Consider adding insights on Christmas celebrations in unusual extreme locations. Sure. Happy to do that.

It might be interesting to include how Christmas traditions were suppressed Wait, this is actually really interesting stuff. So suppressed or adapted during historical conflicts or uncertain regimes. Wow, yeah, I really wanna know about that too.

You could explore futuristic or speculative uses of AI for Christmas marketing. No, okay, that's fine. We can leave that one out for a second.

Consider researching alternative festive meals. Nope, okay, so I'm gonna leave that out. I'm gonna wait for it to finish editing. Okay, so it's now edited the document. We now have a brief of all the stuff we want to know about Christmas, right?

I'm going to say now imagine you have to brief a junior researcher on getting all the information you want that is contained in this note. Please be... write me the research note in the form of one paragraph that is as complete as possible, not missing anything.

Very simple. Basically, I'm now asking the ally, give me a way to frame this research. So if you were to give this brief to someone, what would you tell them in order for them to be able to get to the result you want, all the information that you want that we just brainstormed on?

Deep Research

So I've got a paragraph here. And I'm going to take this. And I'm going to go to, no, not Nobukalem. I'm going to go to Gemini.

And here, you now have a new model or a new dropdown, 1.5 Pro with deep research. How many of you have used Google's deep research, 1.5 deep research yet? Three people in the room. Yes, you're going to have some fun. I mean, the ones that haven't used it yet, so.

OK, I'm going to copy the paragraph here. I'm going to say, OK, let me just look. There, investigate the origins and legacies of Santa Claus and then everything that comes through here. I'm going to hit enter. I'm going to wait for a second.

Gemini is now starting, it's going to create a plan of the research that it needs to accomplish in order to get all the information that we asked it to find. Okay, so we have a research plan. The research plan is fairly extensive. We're looking at 12 different steps. And I am going to hit Start Research.

And what this does now, it's like perplexity on steroids. It's absolutely crazy. So it's going to start looking at the whole internet, everything it can find.

So let's figure out where it starts. I won't take too long there. This is going to take a few minutes, so I'm going to literally spin in and out.

So here you can see it's starting to research these different websites. It's currently crawling 37 of them. It's giving you all the sources of all the information that it's taking in.

So it goes through. Now it's up to 60, because it's going to the second step of the plan. And so what it's doing is every step of the way, it's figuring out what is the search that I have to get to in order to answer this particular part of the plan.

It's at 94 websites now. It's going to go and do this in the background, whilst we go and do something slightly different.

Music Creation

How many of you have heard of Suno? Not many still.

OK. So still many of you are going to be extremely surprised by this, because obviously it's Christmas.

We need to build a song out of this, right? That is Suno Does. It helps you create a song.

So now imagine you're an experienced. We're going to go back to deep research in a second, by the way. It's just it takes a while for it to actually finish, which is why I do this in the middle.

Now imagine you're an experienced songwriter. Write me a song that Hmm. Talks about a researcher researching this topic at Christmas. Very simple. Very simple.

OK. So it's going to give me a song. I'm going to go to Suno. I'm just going to hit Create here. waiting for it to finish the song.

Okay, so I'm going to copy everything we have here. The researchers Christmas quest. That's the name of the song. I'm not really convinced by the name of the song, but we'll see. We'll see what it does.

Uh, the researchers Christmas song. Now what style of music should we do? I mean, I kind of feel like if I give it just Christmas, sorry, contemporary music. Sorry. Wait. Not sure if that's very, I have no idea what even, I mean, this is, I'm musically illiterate to a degree, so I wonder what happens. I'm literally gonna try and do Christmas. I don't know, is that, it can't be, I don't know. You know what? I'm gonna go for one that I tend to use that I know that works very well. Progressive indie rock.

so it is creating the song and we're going to see what comes out on a snowy christmas morning with coffee in hand the researcher sat down with a notebook so grand Santa Claus or Sinterklaas, who could it be? Krampus or Bafana, they're calling to me. Through history and culture, oh, I must dive deep. From mulled wine to cribs, no secret I'll keep.

AI ads are glowing. Christmas has a story, and I'll find it everywhere. Oh, I'm tracing new fires across the ages. They burn from solstice to Jesus. There's so much to learn in turkey's feast, in songs we sing. I'm going to stop there for a second.

But I thought, I mean, I only realized halfway through this when it started talking about Jesus that, like, this is now really meta, being in this church and doing all of this thing at the same time. But I thought that was pretty cool. Like, this is what you can do now, literally within whatever, a minute.

AI-generated Song

In the meantime, we still have Google that is going through here. So it has crawled a total of 103 websites. It's actually at the very end, so I can... Focus here for a second.

So what this is doing now, it has finished crawling everything it thinks it needs to be able to present us with a report, which in this case is 103 websites. It's then analyzing that and going to present us back in the form of a report, which I can transform into a Google Doc, which I can take away instantly.

I did this demo with a... multi-billion dollar company that had just acquired another multi-billion dollar company last week. And I did the demo a day after the acquisition happened, launched it on a search on what are the opportunities and hurdles for these two companies to be successful.

It crawled about 220 or so websites, created a report, which I threw into Gamma. For those of you that don't know about Gamma, I did it live with the CEO of the multi-billion dollar company on the call, gave him the presentation, and he was like, that's better than what I was walking into my board with. So it gives you an idea of just how much this is going to transform the way we do these things.

So I'm waiting for another minute.

Actually, any questions in the meantime as we wait for another minute here on deep research? Yes, sorry, at the back.

Can someone? Yeah. Thank you very much.

Do you know whether deep research trolls the entire web or is it censored and curated? It's the entire web. It's Google search underneath.

Is it ranked or anything like that? Very good question. It's using Google search underneath, so I would imagine yes.

Research Findings

Okay, well, I mean, in the meantime, actually, we only had one question, and now it's come out, right? So we have the report on the right-hand side, a deep dive into Christmas, traditions, legends, global celebrations. So the origins and legacy of Santa Claus.

So the beloved figure of Santa Claus with his rosy cheeks and jolly demeanor has a history that stretches back centuries. His roots can be traced to St. Nicholas, which is where we come back to Sinterklaas. A fourth century Greek bishop from Myra, modern day Turkey.

Renowned for his generosity and secret gift giving, Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of children. So over time, the legend of St. Nicholas evolved, emerging with European folklore and traditions.

In the Netherlands, he became known as Sinterklaas. Okay, so there are actually two different dates, by the way. Sinterklaas is on December 5th.

So I mean, I literally, this is the first time that I realized these, I mean, I knew they had the same type of name, but I didn't know they were literally the same thing, because we celebrate both of them in the Netherlands. Lesser known folklore, Krampus and Bifana, While Santa Claus is the benevolent face of Christmas gift-giving, lesser-known folklore figures add a darker and more complex dimension to the holiday.

Krampus, a half-goat, half-demon creature from the Central European folklore, serves as a counterpart to Saint Nicholas. Okay, I had no idea that that was anything there. Now, I'm going to go a little bit further down because a lot of this stuff you could have gotten from a large language model that would have had its historical texts that are there, right?

So, the bit that shows you that this is actually, More up-to-date information as you're looking here. AI in 2014 Christmas ads.

The year 2024 witnessed a notable trend in Christmas advertising, the use of artificial intelligence to personalize and enhance creative storytelling. Yes, I knew it was going to find this one. Coca-Cola's AI-generated holiday ad sparked debate, with some praising its innovation, while others criticized its perceived lack of emotional warmth.

Santa Claus and Folklore

The ad featuring AI-generated visuals of Santa Claus. How many of you have seen the AI ad from Coca-Cola? OK, a few.

I wonder, actually, if I go here. You can literally see the sources where all of this comes from, by the way, which is one of the beautiful things of the research.

What I'm going to do in the middle, I'm going to actually look at this because I have to do two things. It's going to create a document. So as you see here at the right top, I can convert the entire thing into a Google Doc that I can then use.

So I'm going to take this. And because there's another part of the demo I need to start launching, so I'm going to export it to PDF.

And whilst we're doing that, I have to go into Notebook LM. How many of you have used Notebook LM before? OK, not that many still. Wow.

I'm going to upload the PDF, a comprehensive look at Christmas. And I'm just going to wait until it's done. And I am going to start generating here.

Focus on the ads in 2024. Here I'm going to launch another process. This is now going to start creating a podcast that's going to deep dive into the research that we just created, which we'll then be able to take back.

AI in Christmas Advertising

In the meantime, I thought, why not? go and whoop that's a different one coca-cola Christmas there we go this is the one that everyone keeps talking about this is the one that it's talking about so it's fully AI generated for those of you that are wondering

Always Coca-Cola So there's actually a longer version of this. I just realized there was, well, it's a one-minute version anyways that you can go through.

That was shorter than I thought, because this is going to take like a few minutes to fully generate. Any more questions before we dive into the Notebook LM podcast?

Are there any reasons you would use shell-like deep search versus pro, like 40108? Yes, so deep research does dramatically more research than O1 would do. So basically, if what you need is up-to-date information in depth, it is dramatically more powerful from that perspective.

If what you need is just in the model and it's historical data, then it's fine, then any of these work. With the difference being still that deep research produces, as you can see here, We're looking at, well, when you don't include, how many pages are we looking at here? I forgot where the page numbers are. Ah, 11.

So you're looking at an 11-page report that has come out of our, whatever, five-minute interaction going through. So that is also a massive difference. Oh, one would not do that.

Does deep research hallucinate? Very interesting question. And so NotebookLM doesn't. And that was one of the massive things that made it so interesting.

I have not gone deep enough. Deep Research came out on Thursday. And so I haven't properly gone deep into it. That is definitely a question I should need the answer to. I will go and do my research on that. Maybe we should ask Deep Research.

Conclusion

So just in terms of the validity of the research, and that's following on from the lady's question there, I mean, doing this kind of cannibalizes their commercial model, right? Because you don't need to go visit the website, so you don't need to be served the adverts. So at what point are they going to start promoting certain sources over others in the answers you get back? I mean, that is a question for Google. I wouldn't know the answer to when they start to do this.

I think the likelier starting point is they start to charge pretty dramatic prices for things like this, because you're basically doing the work of multiple researchers for a week. Again, I did this presentation for a quantitative trading firm recently, and there were multiple people in the room, and I was doing a real live example. And it had done a similar quality job to multiple people in that room who had spent more than a week on it. And so yes, the quality and you can charge a premium for it.

So you're seeing this more and more. Who in this room is familiar with Devon, the coding agent? So they're charging $500 a month now to be able to use the software. O1 Pro on ChatGPT is only ChatGPT Pro, which is $200 a month. So there are more and more of these. I would expect in some cases you'll start paying thousands of dollars a month for the access to an agent that actually does the work that it says it does.

So in things like perplexity, you do get hallucinations and you find that sometimes you find that the references are nonsense. And have you done it or have people done it where they have gone back and asked deep research to check everything? Not at the moment. Not at the moment.

So we have the interactive mode that's here now. So what's going to happen now is you're going to have two people talk about what we just did as research. And I, as you saw, I asked it to focus on the advertising, right? But that doesn't mean it's only going to do it. It's just going to focus on the advertising bit. Let's see what it comes up with.

Final Thoughts

Welcome back everyone. Today, we're diving into a topic that's near and dear to many of our hearts. Christmas.