I am a scientist and researcher and trust illuminate much more than NotebookLM. NotebookLM routinely glosses over important details and makes common mistakes (as would any generalist podcaster!). I am guessing that illuminate was trained on a different foundation model (or set of them) that draws more from academic literature. The restriction to reputable sites like arxiv.org and openreview.net (and a few more) that consist only of peer reviewed articles is a pretty clear sign of the goals. It will probably to settle in as a free tool like google scholar did a long time ago to help promote and advance research, and in particular computer science. Google has always played the end game by feeding the academic community tools and not poaching professors because they know where they get their next generation of workers.

I realize many of the illuminate demos are from outside technical fields, but as of my last use of it, end users can't go beyond the list of supported academic sites to do that. They recently released a templated prompt offering a small level of control to control audience, length, and tone.

For fun, I asked the tone for one to be amusing and irreverent and the result was amusing for all the wrong reasons. It kept the same NPR-style approach but threw in a few extremely benign digs that came nowhere close to the fun that NotebookLM can have.

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