(2023-01-17) Lee: Notion, AI, And Me

Linus Lee: Notion, AI, and Me. Over my last year of independent work, I built a lot of prototypes and stepped one foot into research land

One thing I spent a lot of time thinking about is the life cycle of ideas: How a good idea can die on the vines because of bad or premature execution. How a bad idea can become the “default” because it just happened to be what everyone adopted when a big paradigm change swept the world. (adoption life cycle)

One thing I learned in 2022 is that I feel most fulfilled when I work on the early stages of an idea — learning new things about our world, and exploring what new powers those ideas give us in this world. But I want to get better at the later stages, and understand how they work. Because without the execution and distribution that help good ideas reach billions of people, the world won’t improve on its own. (marketing)

That last, long stage — taking great ideas out of the lab and sculpting it into something billions of people could use — is a particular strength of Notion. Many features people love about this tool are ideas that are, at their core, technically complex, like end-user programmable relational databases or transclusion.

My excitement about working at Notion comes from my optimism for bringing these skills, and the growing distribution Notion has in the hands of knowledge workers and creatives around the world, to some of the hard and interesting problems I’ve been thinking about for the last year.

my eternal favorite (working question): How can we improve humanity’s relationship to language and text? Can we use language models to build a better notation for ideas, something akin to what the Indo-Arabic numerals were to the Roman? Is there a better way to interact with ideas than writing, by directly manipulating concepts in latent space?