Interfacing with AI, with Linus Lee of Notion AI

Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!

Today my guest is Linus Lee, AI product leader at Notion and AI explorer extraordinaire.

I have followed Linus online for a couple of years now, fascinated by his many groundbreaking projects and unique way of thinking about AI systems. From creating novel interfaces that visualize and manipulate generative models in their latent space, to developing techniques for semantically editing text and images, Linus has been a pioneering tinkerer.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we dig into the details of how Linus goes about his explorations. He shares his toolkit, from PyTorch as a foundation to the custom tools he's built over time for data visualization, model evaluation, and rapid experimentation. We discuss the importance of spending time with data and failure cases, and the value of building your own tools to deeply understand the problems you're trying to solve.

Linus also offers his perspective on the current capabilities of language models, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for improvement. Beyond hallucination reduction, instruction following, and cost efficiency, he emphasizes the need for better general reasoning as a longer-term goal.

We speculate about the future, considering scenarios like models communicating with one another via high-dimensional embeddings, techniques to connect latent spaces across modalities, and the societal implications as AI capabilities continue to advance. Linus articulates a vision centered on amplifying rather than replacing human intelligence, a principle he believes should guide the development and deployment of AI-powered products.  

Throughout this episode, Linus demonstrates the curiosity, resourcefulness, and thoughtfulness that have made him such an influential figure in the AI community. His work inspires us to engage more deeply with these systems, to build the tools we need to understand them, and to steer their development in a direction that deepens rather than diminishes human creativity and agency.

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Now, please enjoy this deep dive into the art and science of exploring AI systems with Linus Lee.