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Unsupervised Learning

Ep 22: Notion AI Engineer Linus Lee: Behind the Scenes of Notion AI

Nov 16, 2023
Linus Lee, an AI engineer at Notion, shares behind-the-scenes stories of one of the most widely used AI tools today. Topics include developing AI products, staffing, educating users, challenges in building Notion Q&A, partnerships with Anthropic and Open AI, iterating on interfaces, and over-hyped/under-hyped AI features.
01:01:47

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • Notion AI team focuses on finding the right abstractions for AI features, balancing flexibility and guidance for users.
  • Alternative architectures to transformers are considered underhyped and can lead to innovative solutions.

Deep dives

Building AI Features at Notion

Notion AI team has successfully shipped AI features like AI writer and Autofill. They started with prototyping and quickly iterating on the output, dogfooding the features internally and gathering feedback. The team found that users mostly utilize pre-built prompts for popular use cases like summarization and improving writing, but also iterate on the AI outputs for their specific needs. The team focuses on finding the right abstractions for AI features, balancing flexibility and guidance for users. They are still exploring the building blocks and organization for Notion AI and considering partnerships and integration with other teams.

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