Introducing GenAI in O’Reilly Answers

Here's an email I received today as the author of two O'Reilly books, Multithreaded JavaScript and Distributed Systems with Node.js.

Hi Thomas,

We're excited to announce an enhanced version of our O’Reilly Answers feature, powered by generative AI. Since the Fall 2023 beta, we’ve fine-tuned this tool to better align responses with the topic your content covers, ensuring a seamless and enriching learning environment. As with all AI projects, we remain committed to continuous improvement.

Now, when a user has a question along their learning journey, they can get immediate clarification on a key term or concept. The entire content catalog available on O’Reilly is right at their fingertips, sourced and attributed.

As we shared with you in November, while we retain the rights to create derivative works from the content on our platform, we firmly believe in transparency regarding our plans. We respect your copyrights and are committed to honoring them. In line with this commitment, our updated Answers tool will track the sources of the answers it provides—and give credit and payment to you if you have royalty-bearing content and it is utilized. We’re proud to be one of the first companies to build a model that compensates content creators for use of their original work in a world of AI.

We believe the integration of generative AI with your expert content will significantly enhance the learning experience we offer. AI holds tremendous potential to benefit our users, and we’re thrilled to continue launching new AI-powered features while adhering to the AI policy we shared last November.

This new version of Answers is expected to start rolling out to customers the week of June 3, and your O’Reilly account will be updated too so you can try it out yourself. We’ll be closely monitoring user engagement and will promptly address any issues to refine the experience as it becomes widely available.

Thank you for your continued support and for being an integral part of this exciting journey.

Best,

The O’Reilly Team

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.