The Infographic and Slide Deck features of NotebookLM, powered by Nano Banana Pro, are so useful and popular that the Google team had to temporarily enable access controls.
To some extent, this is a necessary move: first, to provide paying users (Pro) with a better experience, and second, to validate the commercialization path.
Naturally, the result is that the pressure on Google's servers dropped instantly. Upon waking up this morning, all usage has returned to normal and is incredibly smooth. There are no more annoying "503" errors, and even for 4K images, the generation speed has returned to how it was when the model was first released and hadn't yet gone viral.
I'm not sure if this leads to another conclusion: in the AI era, users' willingness to pay might not be as high as originally anticipated. The group truly contributing is actually quite small and has mostly been tapped out. This is just a question that needs observation; perhaps the next point of observation will only be Google's CY25Q4 earnings report.
Back to the point: now that the network has improved, I've had time to modify some code and start some new experiments. I might have made a small mistake yesterday. While I thought setting "donations" as an unlocking condition for sharing new apps was cool, it somewhat felt like "moral kidnapping," which increased the number of variables affecting the results.
However, I'll stick to explicit unlocking conditions.
Meeting any of these three conditions: 1. 50,000+ views; 2. 500+ likes; 3. 1,000+ shares.
I just made some small changes and added support for 4K resolution.
A single image now reaches a size of about 9MB.
Supported multi-text uploads. I have some ideas for further improvements on the input side.
This process reminded me of the impact on Adobe. I have believed that ChatGPT would have a significant impact on Adobe since it first came out. We can also see interesting market changes over the past five years: from the "AI application" craze when Firefly first launched, to the growing belief that models will eventually compress the living space of such tools.
Instead, in the last month, it has shown movement relatively in sync with the market and industry, without any special reaction to the release of Nano Banana Pro.
Currently, I am actually not as firm in my stance as I used to be; the problem of the "last mile" vs the "last ten miles" is quite complex. Often, if you aren't an in-depth user with firsthand experience, you can't feel it clearly: after all, I have unsubscribed from Creative Suite for over two years now.
Let's briefly look at their Earnings Call. The first image is the result page from the generation tool.
I won't comment on the specific content. Simply put, AI is revolutionary in two aspects: Space—it is a production from another dimension, disrupting existing "human-led" processes; and Scale—scale is not simple addition or even multiplication, it's a change in the measurement scale, and it's bidirectional, both increasing the macro scale and significantly shrinking the micro scale.
Is quantum mechanics a form of mechanics? Haha.