So I heard this NotebookLM audio overview recently shared on X (@shrikanth_krish), and it completely floored me in a way I wasn't expecting. NotebookLM has always impressed me before, mainly when I was learning about technical content . But this time there was something different, something that caught me off guard in the most surprising way.
The person who shared it had fed NotebookLM a bunch of content that was basically a lecture on Advaita Vedanta from Mani Dravid Shastriji. The original material was this dense mix of Bengali, Hindi, and Sanskrit—the kind of thing that feels almost impenetrable by design unless you're already steeped in that world. But somehow, NotebookLM just kicked it out of the park and made me think about things I hadn't been thinking about in a while.
Most of the time when I'm thinking about AI, my mind goes straight to the obvious places—how it's going to change the way we work, its impact the global economy, what it means for companies and enterprise adoption. Those are the conversations I'm usually having, the frameworks I'm usually operating in. But we usually ignore the more immediate thing - how AI might impact the world at large, society at large, culture at large. This was one of those moments that pulled me completely outside that frame.
The topic itself was something that used to haunt me—this whole question of how our actions become the source of our bondage, but those same actions, if you approach them with the right attitude, can become a source of liberation instead. I've tasted bits of this understanding in my own life during my life as a full-time volunteer in a non-profit, had those glimpses where you feel like you're working without grasping, acting without attachment. But sustaining that state has always been the challenge for me even then. These days I don’t even remember when was the last time I thought about this.. So When I heard these two chatty causcasian artificial voices mouthing those lofty insights, it genuinely shook me and touched me deeply.
It reminded me of something I remember hearing about Buddha's revolution from Sadhguru. There were two things that really stood out about what Gautama Buddha did. First, he spoke in Pali, this very common language, to make his teachings accessible to everyday people instead of keeping them locked away in scholarly Sanskrit. Second, the practices he offered were simple and practical, not overly technical—things that ordinary people could actually apply and that would actually work. There was this compassion in making profound wisdom accessible.
In a strange way, I found that same spirit echoed in what NotebookLM was doing. Here was this AI taking some really obstinate text spoken in an obstinate language and making it so clear and accessible. Who knows where something like that might touch people, what kinds of seeking/understanding it might unlock. And what surprised me even more was how it got all the nuances right, all the interesting philosophical moments. There were points where it kept referring back to the original Sanskrit words, maintaining that precision even while making everything understandable.
I just continue to be floored by how good these technologies are at what we think of as language tasks. But in this context, it becomes something that feels almost like magic. There's that quote about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and that's exactly how this felt. Beautiful engineering that's so sophisticated it stops feeling like engineering at all.
What's got me excited now is thinking about which other niches AI might transform that we're not even considering yet. We're all focused on enterprise AI and agentic AI because most of us are thinking from an economic point of view, which makes sense. But in the wider world, in all these unexplored or uninvested areas of science and humanities and spirituality—I don't know what other transformations might be waiting there.
It's funny how something can completely shift your perspective when you least expect it. One moment you're thinking about AI in terms of productivity and business models, and the next moment you're confronted with its potential to be a bridge between ancient wisdom and contemporary understanding. I'm still sitting with all of this, still feeling that sense of possibility about what else might emerge from these unexpected intersections.
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