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Notion AI – waiting list signup

• faizshah 4y ago
  I’m curious to know what the profitability of a feature like this is? Are generative text models and image models cheap enough for consumer products or do you need to charge a premium?
  • texasbigdata 4y ago
    Definitely locks the user in, pushes engagement up, probably pushes the creation of new "blocks" up, etc. Defends against google docs doing it to them?
    • jillesvangurp 4y ago
      Google already has AI based autocomplete in things like Gmail and docs. It's not very useful of course but technically others are catching up here.
• xmorse 4y ago
  This is awesome! i was searching for a writing tool integrated into Notion just yesterday Together with Notaku [0] i can now create blog posts and help articles much faster, choosing Notion for my websites CMS was the right idea [0] https://notaku.so https://notaku.so
• angryGhost 4y ago
  w.t.f... fix the tables instead, let me copy a row without having to duplicate the table, turn into a database, copy the rows and paste in original table
• lma21 4y ago
  I need a better full text workspace search instead !
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Every time a new easy-to-use content generation AI tool drops, the collective blood pressure in Google's spam detection department goes up by 1% :D This one should be promising!
  • dangerlibrary 4y ago
    Another day older and a deeper neural net, one step closer to a dead internet.
    • notduncansmith 4y ago
      Loaded 16 terabytes of AI code, and the scrum master said “Well, bless my soul”
    • sph 4y ago
      It's going to be real fun when more than half of "user" generated content on the net will have been generated by AI content farms: forum comments, code, videos, pictures, entire websites. I honestly think this is how we reach this "dead internet" meme. We're probably less than a decade away from this. EDIT: here's my bold prediction. In the next 10 years, a very successful content aggregator (imagine Reddit, Instagram or Tiktok), where content is exclusively and openly AI generated, will reach the Alexa top 100 ranking. We will have HN users saying we're too old and we just don't get why it is more fun to mindlessly get your dopamine fix from scrolling and liking AI generated images.
      • TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Arguably, we're already there. Most of the Internet is content marketing, and that content isn't meaningfully different than AI output. That it's generated by protein bots instead of silicon ones is just implementation detail.
        • sph 4y ago
          > Most of the Internet is content marketing, and that content isn't meaningfully different than AI output. I argue that it is. Human content farms don't create long-form articles, artwork or deep fake videos by the truckload, in minutes, from just a little prompt. And humans are relatively expensive. AI generated spam will be orders of magnitude cheaper, faster and thus incredibly more common.
• m_ke 4y ago
  Should focus on summarizing existing notes that nobody is reading instead of generating more noise.
  • brap 4y ago
    Yes please. I’ve been toying with the idea of making a browser extension that summarizes pages into ~5 bullets, <20 words each. And maybe a picture. Someone please make this. Too lazy to read walls of text. Too lazy to build the extension myself.
    • aliqot 4y ago
      title, subtitle, and thesis statement from each paragraph.
    • Waterluvian 4y ago
      This already exists on Reddit as a bot that says “the best I did was reducing this article by 87%, here it is…” I imagine you just need to wrap that in a browser plug-in. Or maybe already exists.
      • lma21 4y ago
        This is done by autotldr[1] which is powered by smmry[2]. Smmry is pretty neat actually ! [1] http://autotldr.io/ http://autotldr.io/ [2] https://smmry.com/ https://smmry.com/
        • return_to_monke 4y ago
          Sadly it seems to fail bad on things that aren't new articles. Try for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming/ as an input to smmry - you don't get the idea
          • criley2 4y ago
            I mean, it works ok. I think the issue here is structured documents like that wikipedia article. If you used smmry on each section, leaving the headers and structure alone, you'd probably get a far more 'coherent' result, and it's not surprising that the tool is built for "single block" content. It would probably not be very hard to build a mediawiki smmrly extension that does just that.
• danpalmer 4y ago
  I've seen the benefit of AI for completing sentences, or lines of code, and I can imagine the benefit to creative writing where things do not have to be factually correct, however writing in Notion is typically writing about something in the real world. The problem with AI text generation is that it does not have that real world context. A great example is the first example on this page: writing a blog post announcing Notion's AI generation. The AI text generator does not know the feature set, and therefore either the content is going to lack any detail about the product, or it's going to have incorrect detail, in both cases providing no value. What are use-cases for this that people will actually benefit from? Creative writing - sure. Brainstorming? Maybe for very vague and basic topics that don't need any business context. But more than that?
  • ianbutler 4y ago
    I'll use github copilot as an example, it pulls context from your surrounding code files and code in the same file. Something like that gives it the context your thinking of and a similar technique may be able to solve that problem here.
    • danpalmer 4y ago
      I think there's a big difference between matching up variable names and the context of what you're working on in a file, and saying "brainstorm 5 marketing strategies for me" like in the examples here. With code, most of the context Copilot needs to do a good job is a) written down and b) parseable in very well defined formats. With business contexts most of the context won't be written down, or won't be in a structure that is useful, or won't be parseable. Let's take the example of the marketing brainstorming. Let's say you're a super organised small business and you write down a report on every marketing experiment you try, and influencer marketing didn't work for the product, so you write a report on why TikTok creators are not a good direction for marketing. To know not to suggest influencer marketing, Notion needs to: have all your documents, know that document is relevant, have the "idea" (let's brush past the fact this was essentially written on someone else's brainstorming list and learnt from), know that the idea is related to that other document(s), know that the conclusion was negative sentiment in the way that matters, and then know that because it's doing brainstorming, lists of ideas should probably be filtered by things that haven't worked in the past. Maybe it's not the worst thing if it generates "influencer marketing", but if you ask it for 5 and it always gives you the 5 you've done before, then you start having to engineer your way around its stupidity – give me 10 ideas, or give me 5 ideas that don't include xyz. Is it providing value over, say, googling "small business marketing ideas" and reading an article full of ads titled "Ten things that will transform your small business marketing". That's low value content, but it seems most likely to me that this will produce largely similar results.
• aliqot 4y ago
  AI is the new 3D printing. Cool novelty that will undoubtedly change the world somehow, but I hope we avoid letting it become this creation that is played out within 5years, overapplied, and shoved into any process whether it improves the product or not because its "the future". I'm about two AI support bots from snapping.
  • jnovek 4y ago
    I know this wasn’t your point, but I’m a 3D printing enthusiast and I follow what’s going on in the industry. I wouldn’t consider 3D printing played out, but I would say that it’s become more boring in the last few years. This is a good thing because it means that it’s being sustained by real work (e.g. medical, prototyping, micro-manufacturing) rather than hype. I do agree that there was a hype phase, though, and the AI hype phase will probably be similar if not bigger.
  • heystefan 4y ago
    Where do you see AI support bots? Don't think I ran into those yet.
    • sixstringtheory 4y ago
      Every chatbot on a webpage or in any app.
      • heystefan 4y ago
        Those are not AI, those are MCQ. I think I've seen just one that allowed you to have a "real" convo.
• phailhaus 4y ago
  Highly skeptical of AI applications like this, unless you have a personal active learning model that you can refine over time. Otherwise, it can only really answer broad canned questions like "10 ways async communication is more productive". As the other commenter pointed out, seems like it would be way more useful to use AI to summarize existing content and suggest links than to pretend like it can do the work of an employee with zero context.
  • zerkten 4y ago
    I'm skeptical too, but at the very least this gets buzz with somewhat limited development and maintenance effort. Summarizing your content and building personal models is expensive, hard to debug and support, and it opens the possibility of attacks from competitors who "don't process your data" or "build models off customer data" (even if properly secured/isolated.)
  • jibe 4y ago
    I work for a company in the blogging space (not AI related), and we are seeing huge uptake on AI content generation. Something tipped in the last month or so. For most bloggers, the hardest part of a creating a piece of content is starting it - staring at the blank screen. At best, they are using AI to jumpstart themselves, then they can flesh it out, rewrite, etc. Human nature being what it is though… Overall, I think it is effective enough to be a complete disaster for the internet.
• netcraft 4y ago
  having the notion app on my phone means that clicking the link opens the app and gives content not found.
  • danpalmer 4y ago
    Classic issue with Universal Links, assuming you're on iOS. I implemented Universal Links for an app a few years ago. I think many developers think it's trivial to implement, follow the one-page guide to setting it up, and think the feature is complete. In reality it's much more complex to do for an app of any real size.
    • mrbombastic 4y ago
      They probably need a wildcard in their routing to open a webview for stuff like this they can’t handle in the app. But yes universal links are tough to get right. Easy initial implementation and then surprise bugs forevermore :)
• bearjaws 4y ago
  Even their examples seem better off as just templates of different speech patterns. For example Minto pyramid is used, https://untools.co/ https://untools.co/
• remram 4y ago
  Does this mean they are training a model on their users' notes? Or does it all come from a separate model e.g. GPT3?
  • wouterjanl 4y ago
    I am wondering the same thing. From their website: "Your data is encrypted at rest and in transit." (see: https://www.notion.so/help/security-and-privacy https://www.notion.so/help/security-and-privacy). I am not really sure what that means.
    • Terretta 4y ago
      Decoding for all "we take your security seriously" pages on the web: In transit means https (like your comment getting sent to this page). At rest means the underlying store uses a key, like S3, or even HDD encryption. It's encrypted on write to the disk, and decrypted on read. This may be fantastic for when nation state black ops sneak into the data center and remove the server's drives for forensic analysis, useless for anything else. (To be fair, it's useful on a laptop. Not so useful in a data center.) Neither of these means it's encrypted between reading disk and sending over HTTPS. Neither one means employees, servers, or clients, can't see your data.
      • wouterjanl 4y ago
        Thanks for the clear and detailed response! It's what I feared it meant. It's a pity they need to use such deceptive language, I find. I really liked notion as a product. This is kind of a wakeup call for me that using the cloud pretty much means giving up control - and not just theoretically.
  • KidComputer 4y ago
    Yes, they imply they will. Notion may, however, use your Content or Customer Data to improve and train Notion’s own models. https://www.notion.so/Notion-AI-Program-Terms-c0066e3003904176bb50b9f7c16164b9 https://www.notion.so/Notion-AI-Program-Terms-c0066e30039041...
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  Who's bearish on AI used like this? Seems like everyone is packaging the cutting edge work/research and putting into this same "bucket". Will it go the way of 3D tvs? Interesting for 2 years then gone? We'll see. Not to mention these companies are 100% training their "bot" with your data. Notion will learn from user's notes. Replit will learn from their new "bounty marketplace" they launched. Github from the repositories. Etc.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    This makes me think twice about using them to store my data.
  • coffeefirst 4y ago
    It’s a spam machine. That’s all it is. That’s all it will ever be. I get why it’s fun to make a system like this, but does it really never occur to anyone that no human wants to read AI generated copy?
• selfmodruntime 4y ago
  Sad to know that instead of a proper API or offline support the notion team has decided to spent their time on AI. Notion turned 8 this year and it still doesn't have the aforementioned offline support, no repeating dates and events and no plugin support. Why companies prioritise a product nobody asked for instead of features which a large majority of users are vocal in support of is beyond me. I can only hope a competitor will force them to shift their focus.
  • bongobingo1 4y ago
    Notion is a VC backed company. Less snidely, it's probably a lot more interesting to poke at AI integration than building another REST API. I bet there are more programmers putting their hand up to "explore that area" at the stand ups.
    • amelius 4y ago
      Since when do programmers get to work on stuff they want to work on?
      • wittycardio 4y ago
        Since forever , every place I've worked has had insane amounts of autonomy for programmers
        • amelius 4y ago
          Well, looks like that is about to change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33620662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33620662
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • wittycardio 4y ago
            Yeah we've lived in a good job market. Can't assume it'll last forever but giving programmers some autonomy is likely the best way to move a software company forward so I wouldn't be surprised if that continues
• IgorPartola 4y ago
  Great. A noise machine that will make people feel "productive" while producing little actual value.
  • dang 4y ago
    "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • IgorPartola 4y ago
      Fair enough. Based on the two examples I looked at on the posted page, one was a brainstorm ideas list for how to promote Notion AI which was fairly obvious. It did not include anything novel, just literally spit out what a quick Google search for “ideas to promote a new product” would have. I suppose you could say that it saves you the search but if you aren’t someone who understands promotion inherently then you’d need more info in the first place and if you are then this list is unnecessary as you’ll already have a promotion strategy in mind. The second example was the AI writing a blog post introducing Notion AI. This is what I really referred to as a noise machine. The reason you need a blog post like that in 2022 is not for people to read but for Google’s indexer to read so that it gives your page and site all the points and you get better SEO. In other words the whole concept of this has gone off the rails where we have computers writing articles for other computers to read, which will ultimately be fed to another “AI” to learn from to write better articles for computers to read. Why are we perpetuating this circle jerk? Wouldn’t it be better to fix some core issues? Lastly, I think the tech that allows you to turn a sentence or two into a coherent article is quite exciting. But I think this is somewhat the wrong application for it.
      • dang 4y ago
        Much better comment—thanks! One for the 'rebound' list - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23507259.
  • 4y ago
• kiru_io 4y ago
  This is pretty cool! I started working on GPT3 integration for Notion [0]; but I guess that was obvious to have AI integrated in Notion. The question is when will we get AI generated images in Notion? Well, then I can shut down my side project [1] [0] https://twitter.com/kiru_io/status/1572290853103865856 https://twitter.com/kiru_io/status/1572290853103865856 [1] https://slashdreamer.com/ https://slashdreamer.com/
• fareesh 4y ago
  Notion is painfully slow - if I use a notes feature I need it to load instantly. I find obsidian to be much better for this reason.
  • dexterdog 4y ago
    You can do AI on Obsidian with the GPT-3 AI writer.
    • fareesh 4y ago
      Thanks do you have a link to a guide or video or webpage where I can check this out?
      • dexterdog 4y ago
        https://github.com/nhaouari/obsidian-textgenerator-plugin https://github.com/nhaouari/obsidian-textgenerator-plugin https://scribe.citizen4.eu/@beingpax/how-to-use-gpt-3-ai-writer-in-obsidian-to-improve-productivity-c129cc7dad20 https://scribe.citizen4.eu/@beingpax/how-to-use-gpt-3-ai-wri...
• sidkhanooja 4y ago
  Writing is one field that I think won't be able to achieve the 'human' touch anytime soon. Art? Sure, as we have already seen with DALL-E and the like. Music? Doubtful (look up Kandrake-Z for an example), but not sure if it will expand beyond plunderphonics and noise. But writing? Meh. I don't know if anyone even uses content-generating AIs like this for writing - but I'd be glad to change my mind by seeing some hard numbers. I mean, except for incomprehensible content-generated articles that pop up on searches only because of PageRank's flaws.
  • newbYhrly 4y ago
    “AI” generates bulk structure, humans adjust “at the edge”. Everyone is building Mechanical Turks to nudge users to add artistic nuance AI lacks so far. Personally I prefer using the libraries directly rather than gift my work to startups I’m also paying subscription fees to. Startups are basically double dipping; let us train based on your behavior! …for $9.99/mo per user. Oh and we own the outcome! Hoping to get some useful open models and data sets for game world generation soon!
• flakiness 4y ago
  Thought this is an April Fool's joke kind of thing, but apparently they're serious? That's said, the spell checker is nice and the translation would be helpful too.
• terminal_d 4y ago
  I'm very wary of all these companies building their offerings on GPT-3. It's dependent on OpenAI until it's cheap enough to host your own instance, and then they wouldn't have a proper service to offer anyway. Also, GPT-3 completion is pretty hacky, and anyone who needs it on an information organization pipeline is not taking it seriously anyway.
• desireco42 4y ago
  I will join others to conclude that, being VC backed it what makes you do things like this and is a signal that company will work on more shallow features and focus on growth for growth sake. Notion is solid app and idea and it would be a shame to became just one more thing that is just noise.
• impulser_ 4y ago
  If you actual read what the AI prints when it's asked to create a blog post. It repeats the same thing over and over again. You can sum up the whole blog post in one sentence. Notion AI helps you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing you with suggestions on how to improve them. It writes like how I did when I was a kid in elementary school writing English papers lol.
  • jlhawn 4y ago
    But it understands your work habits! Also, it uses machine learning to understand your work habits! This makes you more productive by understanding your work habits.
  • r2222 4y ago
    Yeah I thought at first the video was skipping or rewinding or something when I tried to play-pause-play my way though it as it kept repeating essentially the same thing over and over. Sounds like some next-gen Lorem Ipsum.
• abrichr 4y ago
  On iOS this link opens up the Notion app which says “this content does not exist”. Removing the app was a quick workaround.
  • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
    Honestly the web link to iOS app connectivity across the board seems completely broken these days. I always just end up in the home screen of the app in deep linking to.
  • Terretta 4y ago
    > On iOS this link opens up the Notion app which says “this content does not exist”. Here I thought that was a meta comment on the notion of AI.
  • arnvald 4y ago
    Opening in private tab also works (at least in Firefox)
  • airstrike 4y ago
    Now I feel like feeding "this content does not exist" to Stable Diffusion in true Magritte fashion
• skc 4y ago
  This looks like the folks at Notion had nothing better to do, frankly. Poems? Really?
• thedangler 4y ago
  It's funny because people can just use other AI tools that do the exact same thing already with out Notion AI. So many services do this.
• __alexs 4y ago
  I'm starting to think more people take Roko's Basilisk seriously than I realised.
• thatwasunusual 4y ago
  Please stop calling this AI.
  • dapirian 4y ago
    why?
    • thatwasunusual 4y ago
      Because it's not artificial intelligence by definition.
• SirensOfTitan 4y ago
  With all of the exciting directions knowledge management has been moving in lately, it's disheartening to see that Notion's product vision is already so uninspired. Particular in the corporate space, the problem of finding relevant knowledge (and keeping that knowledge up to date) is a really hard problem. I think competitors like Mem are going to eat Notion's lunch here (categorization and perhaps tagging of stale content is a much more reasonable application of ML than this). ... further, Notion's performance is so absolutely awful that my very small company had to stop using it. Latency is incredibly relevant to note taking and writing apps. The marketing page example is also so contrived: "Write a blog post introducing Notion's new AI feature." How would the AI even know what that feature even is? Where's the context? It seems like this just proposes static solutions to dynamic problems.
  • selfmodruntime 4y ago
    > Particular in the corporate space, the problem of finding relevant knowledge This really is incredibly hard. A large fortune 500 company I worked for this summer had a whopping 35000 confluence pages. There is no navigating a knowledge base that vast. You couldn't even clean it up, because there was no way to know if someone would need some piece of fringe information on a rarely visited page any time in the future.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • tjungblut 4y ago
      It's also a matter of vocabulary and writing about your knowledge. It's almost impossible to find somebody that solved the same problem you currently have, because somebody that solved it didn't write about it. We're kinda OK searching code nowadays, but we're not able to discover architectures or abstractions properly.
    • Invictus0 4y ago
      I'd bet my had that most of it was meeting notes
    • 4y ago
• politician 4y ago
  Is this trained or fine-tuned on the content of existing Notion customers like GitHub Copilot? The FAQ is unclear: > Any information used to power Notion AI will be shared with our partners for the sole purpose of providing you with the Notion AI features. We do not allow any partners or 3rd parties to use your data for training their models, or any other purpose.
  • _mhr_ 4y ago
    The privacy policy / terms is clear that while they don't share data with third parties, they help themselves to the data for their own models. Misleading of them to leave that off in their FAQ. And it's opt-out, not opt-in.
• dzink 4y ago
  That page is now missing. Maybe they’ve changed their mind. Generative AI is one of the few sectors that gets VCs still excited these days, but the text version of it is fraught with unresolved problems. Try getting rare code or the inauguration poem in it for completion and see what comes out. Spoiler: it’s either direct copy or gibberish (content that any good editor would remove) that wastes an ever increasing chunk of humanity’s time. The avid users of generative text today are LAZY and don’t clean up or improve the content - they are compensated and rewarded for word counts and that’s exactly what they get in droves from GPT3. If Notion implements generative features, it needs to label those notes generated, to prevent its systems from filling with crud nobody cares to read over time. If they do content summaries, will they stop with that. That said, generative AI is a feature, that will go everywhere soon - it will be the next copy paste. If developers and product people are not careful, it will also invoke regulation that demands generated content to be labeled to remain legal (or you will loose the reader’s trust in your content).
  • tluyben2 4y ago
    > That page is now missing. Did it open in your Notion client when you clicked on it? Paste the url manually to your browser and it opens.
• tluyben2 4y ago
  Why is this all so buggy? I don’t know why people like Notion so much; I discover bugs literally every day using it with our team (we are paying members with 2 companies). So another lame one; I click on this article in iOS safari and it pops open my iOS Notion app saying ‘this content doesn’t exist’. Well done! I will add it to the list, in Notion. It is the system with the highest popularity while also having the most bugs that I used in a long time. But not for long. It is also slow; started using some similar (but less feature rich) products and things like Joplin are so nice and snappy that I tend to forget the missing features.
  • time_to_smile 4y ago
    > Why is this all so buggy? > started using some similar (but less feature rich) products You may have answered your own question here. At least in my experience, PMs at "feature rich" companies love to push for more new and exciting products (and what's more exciting than AI!?) and find it really annoying when devs talk about fixing bugs or improving existing processes for customers. I'm really hoping one positive result from the current economic turmoil is a return to focusing on delivering value to customers. I remember in years long past when product people viewed solving a customers problem as the key path to a successful company. But I guess years of cheap money and forgetting about the very idea of profit have made people realize that the real customer is VCs.
    • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      One issue there I think is that Notion has had a number of investment rounds, according to crunchbase [0] they've gained $343.2M that way; that plus paying customers means they have a lot of money to burn. And investors don't like it when a company just sits on that money, they want results, they want to see growth, they want cool demos of cool new features or products. I mean you can rebuild the essence of what Notion is with less than $1M. They don't need that money to build more features; I'm convinced that writing the code is the cheapest part of product development these days, despite developers earning five figure sums + bonuses + stock options + $15 / serving premade fruit smoothies from a squeezed bag. [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/notion-so/company_fi...
• KidComputer 4y ago
  Notion may, however, use your Content or Customer Data to improve and train Notion’s own models. Nope, I'm out.
• IceHegel 4y ago
  Good name but feels mediocre to use. Hard to use it intentionally.
• BaudouinVH 4y ago
  in my humble opinion Time Magazine should make AI their annual personality of the year. It will either be zelensky or putin but that would in my opinion be a mistake
• BaudouinVH 4y ago
  invite code for lex.page anyone ?
• marban 4y ago
  How long until AI generated content becomes a political agenda? Not sure why this soulless stuff is being embraced by everyone but I see it as the nuclear spam bomb for the entire Web.
• jmugan 4y ago
  I wonder, if it can be generated by an AI, maybe it shouldn't be written down. Current AI can only generate what most people already know, and the purpose of writing is to express something new.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• sn0w_crash 4y ago
  Generative AI, especially for writing, is really good at producing mediocre content. I think people will quickly realize that poor AI-generated content is the new spam and we’ll see a surge of both algos and people prioritizing human-created content as a result.
• gumby 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to the coming arms race: crappy articles and memos expanded and mostly written by software vs automatic summarizers that strip out the padding and puffery and just leave any useful part.* This "limitless power of AI" (their words) addition to Notion is a great example. It's a kind of anti-compression. * Ah, turns out this second feature has been baked into unix for decades. Most of the email I get and pages I am offered as output of a web search can be summarized using this handy shell command: `echo < /dev/null`
  • mhitza 4y ago
    That future is already here. Recently I've been researching a few physical products and online services, and Google search results returned multiple "articles" from various websites that seemed to be AI generated, with some summarized pros/cons sections that seemed to be from other sources.
    • sph 4y ago
      There already are posters on this very site openly admitting in their profile they use GPT-3 to write their articles and they get decently upvoted. Confronting them on it didn't go too well... Perhaps I'm just a Luddite and the only idiot that's fighting against AI-generated content invading the Internet.
  • chubot 4y ago
    I like the idea of "anti-compression" There are a limited number of ideas with consequence, and we used to read carefully written books about them (or at least some people did) Now everyone just reads junk on the web that is recycled by computers from other sources, and quite often wrong e.g. on nutrition, health, finance, etc. I even see it in my parents, who both got Ph.D.'s in the 1970's (when that kind of degree actually meant something). They don't read books, and read the web instead.
    • gumby 4y ago
      > I like the idea of "anti-compression" I learned this from business books: even the (incredibly tiny number of) good ones are mostly a few pages long. But you can't sell that in an airport, so they are expanded to the size where they can get a binding and go on a news stand shelf. Really no different from the padding in clothes laundry to keep people from burning holes in their clothes.
• martopix 4y ago
  Maybe they should focus on fixing bugs. The editor has significant problems. It happened to me that I literally couldn't copy stuff. I had to download as txt and then copy. Or sometimes you're trying to select a sentence and it selects the whole block, and all these annoying little quirks that I find incredibly enraging.
• prvt 4y ago
  GitHub Copilot moment
• boh 4y ago
  This is essentially innovation theater for a fairly lackluster core product. Adding AI for a feature no asked for is like straight piping your Honda Civic to make it sound like a race car. At the end of the day you're just driving a loud Honda Civic.
  • hitekker 4y ago
    You're onto something with "innovation theater". Companies that overhired need to occupy all their new hands. Well-defined initiatives are already staffed so the extra's are thrown into big, ambiguous initiatives that executives don't pay attention to but have hope for. No attention means no career growth, so the overhired PM's/engineers/whoever put together a performance to steal the spotlight.
• boh 4y ago
  If you're having AI write your posts and coming up with your ideas, you're either a spam site or a failing business.
• TillE 4y ago
  Seems like a pointless toy feature that will be left to rot when people realize that making it useful is actually really hard. There have been some cool developments in AI recently, but it's just not free magic, and it might never be.
• sfitz 4y ago
  Wouldn't a more helpful product direction for this be to use AI to make notion pages shorter? this seems like bloat for bloat's sake.
• masterof0 4y ago
  Congrats on launching the feature, which I will never use. If someone from Notion is reading this, I humbly suggest a few other features that might actually make an impact. - Offline mode. My data is mine, my tables, templates, notes, have no reason to live in your server. - Improve performance. Notion is getting slower with every release. - Full Text Workspace Search. This are features customers actually want. Show some customer obsession and cut the crap with that GPT-3 non-sense. You are helping spammers to automate their workflow, on creating irrelevant posts that match search keys.We already have copy.ai and a ton of other services that do just that.
  • koliber 4y ago
    I am a raving Notion fan. It's one of the few products that I just adore. Maybe my tolerance level is high, or maybe my hardware is good, but actual performance is acceptable. I do hope that Notion does improve offline mode. A single page works that is already loaded works wonderfully. Syncing has been non-problematic for me. I wonder why my phone and mac can't cache all the pages indefinitely, which would allow me to work completely offline. Also, search needs work. Both search from the "search button" and the search that pops up when I type "@bla" are becoming less useful with each additional page in my workspace. Finally, where are tags? Please please please add the ability to add ad-hoc tags to each block and page, the same way I can add comments to each block and page. And then give me the ability to view all tagged items as a kind of virtual page, or a type of database. I'm at a point where I type things like tagIdeasToTry in the actual text and then use search to find all blocks that have that tag. But that requires mental effort, and fighting with the search functionality to get back results. I've even considered @mentioning special pages and then using backlinks as a way of categorizing content, but that only works at page level, and is clunky. Notion, please help an addict get his fix.
    • bredren 4y ago
      You can use tags on pages that are listed in a database, right? I’m not aware of any block level tag though.
      • 4y ago
• WolfOliver 4y ago
  plagiarism on steroids
• TechBro8615 4y ago
  Tapping this link on my mobile phone automatically opened the Notion app which led to a "this content does not exist" error. Maybe the AI can fix it.
  • sfitz 4y ago
    uninstalling the app seems to make the link work properly
• pkos98 4y ago
  Off topic: Any suggestions for a Notion-like knowledge management app with decent handwriting support except OneNote? I need handwriting in order to memorize and structured data (tables/boards/lists etc) in order to be efficient.
• Wronnay 4y ago
  I write my blog posts in VS Code and GitHub Copilot did the same thing. It completed many of my sentences...
• SevenNation 4y ago
  Having watched the video, the kind of content Notion AI generates is the kind I typically stop reading after a few sentences. By then it becomes clear that the article has nothing to say, was written by a non-expert, and is really nothing more than filler. It can't help me solve a problem and won't offer any new insights. That said, it wasn't too long ago that the writing style itself was easy to identify as AI-generated, or even borderline grammatically incorrect. Notion AI does a pretty good job of mimicking an HR-level understanding of a topic. And that's progress. I just wonder what it will take to get to a point when the output is of the quality I'd associate with human subject-expert writers who know how to engage with a reader.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ilmiont 4y ago
  Horrid, horrid, horrid
• ccbccccbbcccbb 4y ago
  My sincere fuck you goes to all the miserable transhumanists who give up all their human essence, including creativity, to their corporate-controlled AI overlords.
• sanjayio 4y ago
  Imagine if the training set includes personal data similar to copilot and particular licensing... that would be horrendous. Notion should at least disclose how the training set is created.
  • drcongo 4y ago
    That was my first thought too.
• melony 4y ago
  Interesting timing, mem just raised 23.5 mil at 110mil post money valuation from OpenAI for ML assisted notetaking.
• colonwqbang 4y ago
  The demo videos are going way too fast, it's almost impossible to read what they say and there is no pause button.
• pembrook 4y ago
  Isn't Notion supposed to be an internal workspace for your company? I understand the idea of cynical marketers wanting to use GPT-3 to churn out keyword nonsense to game Google Search. But why would you want your employees reading/writing AI generated nonsense in your company's workspace? In any case, since GPT-3 is open to everyone now, I think if you're building an AI copywriting tool (eg. Jasper and the 1,000+ others) you're going to have a rough go of it. It's now a commodity feature, not a standalone product. As evidenced by this move from Notion, the GPT-3 API is just going to be bolted on as a feature in whatever tool you're already using.
  • peterth3 4y ago
    The first use case in the demo is generating a blog post, so I’d assume that they’re trying to win the “cynical marketers wanting to use GPT-3 to churn out keyword nonsense to game Google Search” market. I know of some marketing teams that use notion for content management.
• QuadrupleA 4y ago
  God help us. The quality of content on the web is about to get even lower.
• site-packages1 4y ago
  I was a user of Notion for a while but ended up moving to Obsidian, which solves a similar set of problems without the bugs. I’m seeing in this announcement that rather than focus on making a better product or fixing things that are broken, they’re jumping into the AI hype train. Seems like I made the right decision to switch to Obsidian, and over the last year have really enjoyed it.
  • wordyskeleton 4y ago
    Obsidian is basically perfect. Huge fan.
    • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
      Basicaly perfect unless you want a special character in the title of the note.
      • Fission 4y ago
        That’s because your data is stored locally, so special characters in the title = special characters in the filename, which isn’t possible. Small but very worthwhile tradeoff.
        • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
          How is this a small tradeoff? You don't use punctuation signs when writing(even if it's just a title)?
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
        • Spivak 4y ago
          Sure it is, what is this Windows? Put emojis in your file names, it’s fun.
      • 4y ago
• skilled 4y ago
  So Notion learned how to use a GPT-3 API? Ok, cool.
• no_wizard 4y ago
  To anyone who is frustrated with Notion's official client: Notion recently opened up their entire API correct? This would leave a market for 3rd party clients that are snappier and innovation without having to leave the notion platform as a whole correct? Full disclosure: I'd like to gauge interest in a product like this as I'm interested in working on solving it.
  • jitl 4y ago
    Real-time collaboration via the public API is challenging. (I work at Notion)
    • no_wizard 4y ago
      any other notable challenges, and for those challenges are there any workarounds? Additionally, any timeline on improvements to those public APIs? and am I correct to assume the public API is the same API for functionality that notion itself uses or are there unexposed features that only the first party client gets?
      • jitl 4y ago
        The public API is substantially different from the internal API so we can provide a better developer experience with more understandable and consistent interfaces that match product concepts, rather than exposing incidental implementation details. We only build public APIs needed to enable a set of use-cases; right now "develop an alternative editor" is not one of the use-cases we intend to support - so there's no active work toward things like realtime collaboration APIs. If your client decides to use the internal APIs, it may be blocked as part of our anti-abuse countermeasures.
    • speakfreely 4y ago
      Do you have any insight into what the hell they're thinking by putting out this feature before addressing basic stuff like offline mode? This is literally insulting to paid users, pumping out stuff that no one asked for and no one wants while basic feature parity with other products continues to suffer.
• NexRebular 4y ago
  Would've been interesting to have AI in music engraving software... but alas, this wasn't about Presonus Notion
• jonnycomputer 4y ago
  Got a FB ad yesterday inviting me to join xyz to get my very own AI friend to interact with, for a monthly fee of course. With picture of alluring young lady.
• bluetidepro 4y ago
  Sort of unrelated (but someone at Notion may actually see it here): PLEASE NOTION, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, make the tap targets for "to-do" lists larger on mobile devices. I can't stand making a to-do list in Notion if I know I have to use it on mobile. 9/10 times I tap the box to check it off, and it goes to edit mode instead of "checking it". It drives me crazy. Make it more mobile friendly, or make it an option to make it larger. It literally is a SIMPLE fix, and I don't say that lightly. Since it's a web app you can just add a basic CSS media query for mobile devices to make the padding/sizing larger for mobile devices.
  • waboremo 4y ago
    They're in the business of pushing new features. This is why problems like this (and many others) will go unfixed for a long time. Long gone are the days of prioritizing fixes in Notion (which BTW their "performance fix" before they hit hyper growth was abysmal).
    • Spivak 4y ago
      The day bug fixes drive sales you will see companies prioritizing them. This isn’t impossible either, you just have to make “no open bugs” a marketing term.
  • aembleton 4y ago
    Would be better if Notion did it, but if you're on Android using Firefox, then install uBlockOrigin and add the following filters: www.notion.so##.checkboxSquare:upward(2):style(width:30px !important; height:30px !important;) www.notion.so##.check:upward(2):style(width:30px !important; height:30px !important;)
  • _ink_ 4y ago
    For me the number 1 reason of not using notion for all my note taking needs, is that the app is super slow on my device. Granted it is an old LG G6, but there are also apps, which are quite responsive.
• toastercat 4y ago
  The intro video definitely reads like satire. This is either a very early April Fool's joke, or just a silly toy that Notion is marketing for some reason.
• taylorfinley 4y ago
  This is how Skynet takes over, isn’t it? We thought it was going to be fighter planes and attack satellites. Giving the AI overlords the ability to subtly seed ideas into planning docs the world over locks in a more bureaucratic apocalypse. I need to brush off my screenwriting software and ask the AI to write a script with the prompt “Office Space meets Terminator.”
• zamfi 4y ago
  There are hundreds of "use AI to help you draft text" apps out there, and it really feels like a "feature, not product" category of thing. So I'm glad to see a larger player like Notion integrate this feature. That said, every implementation (including Notion's, which admittedly I haven't dug into very much) seems to be same stale "predict the next sentence" interaction, which reminds me very much of the early web's "it's like a store, but online!" vibe. In the sense of "I built this because it was straightforward to build" and not "I built this because I think it best meets what users need". To be fair, building the former can be a prerequisite to building the latter. But honestly, most writing comes in editing; where is the help for editing? For rephrasing, or for making text flow more easily, or for reorganizing an outline and having the text update to reflect that higher-level reorganization? Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate? As someone who writes a lot (granted, in an academic setting), "first draft" is definitely part of the process, but it's just one piece! I suspect that in a few years today's tools will feel like ancient chisel-and-stone implements compared with what will come online. Can we get there already?
  • onatrain 4y ago
    > For rephrasing, or for making text flow more easily, or for reorganizing an outline and having the text update to reflect that higher-level reorganization? Current models can kind of do this, e.g. you could give some text to GPT-3 and ask it to do this. Not sure what the limit on the input length before results degraded would be. But yep, would be nice to see this out there in a nice interface and working well. > Where is the support for finding other text you've previously written that might be appropriate? Semantic search could be used for this, e.g. finding blocks of text similar to what you've already written But yep, this stuff isn't all nicely packaged in one place
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    I know Grammarly gets a lot of hate but their value really is in the editing process. Pro features are awesome and provides you with helpful tweaks based on your tone preferences.
  • superamit 4y ago
• leokeba 4y ago
  As others have said, they should focus on improving their product by fixing annoying bug and adding the features people are actually waiting for instead of more impressive but way less useful stuff like this. I left my own notion in limbo about a year ago because supposedly Google Calendar integration was just about to roll out, and that was the killer feature that would make my workflow really useful. Then nothing happened, and I barely use it because it's still "unfinished". Any recommendation for something similar but a little more powerful and hackable for a developer oriented workflow ?
• thecodrr 4y ago
  This is cool. Not sure about the privacy implications of this. Nowadays anything with AI after it makes me think twice before using it. Especially if it's as critical & personal as a notes app. Who knows in what ways they'll be using the collected data (it's obvious that they will collect data to improve the AI).
• Hallmane 4y ago
  I can't wait for this trend of companies forcing AI "features" into their systems to be over. I get why they're doing it though, It's just such a mundane and safe way to market your product.
• SN76477 4y ago
  Im a long time Notion user... I wish they would focus on features that the users want. How about custom colors ? :(
• r2222 4y ago
  Imagine being a Notion user that’s been wishing for sensible things like offline mode or performance improvements on large databases/docs and finding out they’ve spent their time and money on this instead.
  • longrod 4y ago
    This is why I love Notesnook and what they are doing with their app. Focusing on privacy, performance [0] [1] and their users. I am still amazed by the speed with which they work on different things. Definitely worth following. [0] https://twitter.com/notesnook/status/1591048432931975168 https://twitter.com/notesnook/status/1591048432931975168 [1] https://twitter.com/notesnook/status/1588602471290572800 https://twitter.com/notesnook/status/1588602471290572800
    • robjan 4y ago
      What's your connection? Most of your posts and comments are about Notesnook
• hedora 4y ago
  The article zips by kind of quickly, so I transcribed it: > Introducing Notion Al > Notion Al: Your New Digital Assistant > Introduction > Notion Al is a new artificial intelligence feature from the productivity app Notion. Notion Al is designed to help you be more productive by understanding your work habits and providing suggestions on how to improve them. In this blog post, we'll introduce you to Notion Al and show you how it can help you get more out of your work. > What is Notion Al? > Notion Al is an artificial intelligence feature that is designed to help you be more productive. Notion Al uses machine learning to understand your work habits and provides suggestions on how to improve them. For example, if you tend to procrastinate on certain tasks, Notion Al will suggest ways to overcome that behavior ---- > Promotion Ideas - Make a video showing all the features of Notion Al - Create a blog post highlighting the benefits of using Notion Al - Give a presentation to potential users about the advantages of Notion Al - Reach out to social media influencers and ask them to try out Notion Al - Give free trials to users who are interested in trying out the software
• ggnore7452 4y ago
  I use large language model for work and use Notion daily. while I like the "AI" part (the large language model), think it would be more interesting and productive to use same backend for full text semantic search & question answering or summarizations. But it is cool to see Notion trying this way, kinda curious to see the results when so many people have access to this type of generative model.
• Imnimo 4y ago
  The sample generated blog post for Notion AI scrolls by pretty quickly, but appears to be (obviously) completely unrelated to what Notion AI actually is. How is this any more helpful than just having a template? The language model has no clue what your new product is.
• deegles 4y ago
  Not sure what Notion is using under the hood, but it makes me think about how good GPT-3 is... What will it be like in 10 or 20 years when this tech is dramatically better and is commoditized, available everywhere? It's hard to grasp.
• d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  I have yet to see a text-suggestion tool that is as good as GitHub Copilot in terms of speed and quality. I’ve looked at Lex from Every, and Galactica , not impressed with either of them. I can almost get better results by just writing a comment section with Copilot. https://lex.page/ https://lex.page/ Mem.ai recently raised $20M and they supposedly have AI-assisted writing but I haven’t tried it. But I think it’s really lame that even after all that money raised they still don’t support Math/Latex notation.