Fun little AI tricks for non-developers
Jonathan Soma ▚ js4571@columbia.edu ▚ jonathansoma.com
The goods
One document, one answer
Literally any LLM! Just drag it on in!
Many documents, one answer
You have a lot of documents, and you know the answer to your question is hiding somewhere in there.
“Chatting with documents” is a multi-step process. You ask your question, the computer finds potentially-revelvant-snippets, then ships the question and the snippets off to an LLM. “With this context, how do you answer this question?”
Lots of ways things can go wrong, but lots of ways things can make your life easier.
- NotebookLM, for doing RAG in the cloud
- Msty.app, for doing RAG locally (…when it works)
- NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law, a cautionary tale
Many documents, many answers
- Claude for Sheets, AI in a spreadsheet. Extension here, example worksheet here
Other tools
MacWhisper (and… maybe EasyWhisper? I don’t know Windows!) do a great job transcribing content from audio and videos.
Claude makes it really easy to make tiny baby apps. Just ask for what you want! Here’s an example, or see it live.
Google Pinpoint is a journalism-research-specific tool that does things like fancy fancy searching and structured data extraction. Here are some tutorials: one, two, three