From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
In a Nutshell
Notion evolved from a note-taking app into an AI workspace where humans collaborate with agents, starting with GPT-4 experiments in 2022 and launching features like AI Writer (Feb 2023), Q&A (Oct 2023), and full personal/custom agents (Aug/Sep 2024) that autonomously handle tasks via agent-friendly APIs like Markdown and SQLite. Simon Last highlights rewriting AI harnesses every 6 months, using coding agents to boost engineering ambition (e.g., 100x productivity for top users), and personal agents for email triage and feedback routing that learn from memory pages. The core shift: Notion now optimizes for humans managing agents, not directly performing work, with primitives like databases enabling coordination.
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From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today with Simon Last, co-founder at Notion. Discussion covers Notion's new vision for the AI age as a platform for humans and agents to collaborate, changes in engineering and product org at Notion, and new tools for thought.
Notion is at scale with lots of users, started quite a while ago. Notion has embraced AI aggressively. Simon first got hands on GPT-4 at a company offsite in Mexico in 2022.
I've been watching what's going on in general, super curious about the technology, fascinated to try everything and think about how we can apply it.
It became real when playing with GPT-4, accessed via a prototype interface. Simon and co-founder Ivan both got access. Two big realizations: (1) pretty smart, follows reasonably complicated instructions, writes and edits things; (2) scope of knowledge extremely deep and broad world knowledge. Instantly clear: time is now to apply it, only going to get better.
Talking about Mexico, GPT-4: clearly the time. Started with long-term and short-term vision.
Short-term: obvious writing assistant in documents—select text to rewrite, write text, look something up with sources. Started tiger team, launched in 2-3 months.
Long-term: general assistant with all tools inside Notion humans have—create databases, query/manipulate them, create/edit documents, weave together for longer-range tasks. Started both immediately; short-term shipped quickly, long-term took much longer.
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