OpenAI has developed an AI model that can summarize books of arbitrary length. A fine-tuned version of the research lab’s GPT-3, the model works by first summarizing small sections of a book and then summarizing those summaries into higher-level summaries, following a paradigm OpenAI calls “recursive task decomposition.”
Summarizing book-length documents could be valuable in the enterprise, particularly for documentation-heavy industries like software development. A survey by SearchYourCloud found that workers take up to eight searches to find the right document, and McKinsey reports that employees spend 1.8 hours every day — 9.3 hours per week, on average — searching and gathering job-related information.
