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Comment by jmuguy | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't ever tried Notion before but I sort of vaguely understood it was a nice way to make some documentation and wiki type content. I had a need for something like a table that I could filter that I would normally just do in Google Sheets. So I go check out Notion and their entire site is focused on AI. Look at what this agent can do, or that. I signed up and the entire signup flow is also focused on AI. Finally I was able to locate what I thought was their core offering - the wikis etc. And ended up pretty impressed with the features they have for all of that.

Now maybe Notion customers love all these AI features but it was super weird to see that stuff so prominently given my understanding of what the company was all about.

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It's for investors AFAICT. When Masayoshi Son opens your home page it better say 'AI' in big bold letters.

Is your product a search engine? It's AI now. [1][2]

Is it a cache? Actually, it's AI. [3]

A load balancer? Believe it or not, AI. [4]

[1] https://www.elastic.co/

[2] https://vespa.ai/

[3] https://redis.io/

[4] https://www.f5.com/

but do they use 'native AI' ?

>> https://about.gitlab.com/

whoa I'm out of the loop, what the fuck happened to redis?

Venture capital

Redis had (may still have?) a billboard on the 101 saying something along the lines of, "my boss really wants to you know we're an AI company", which I thought was pretty funny. Hope this bubble pops soon and we can go back to making products that solve problems for people.

Approximately 95% of my experience using "AI" so far is as something I accidentally activate then waste a few seconds figuring out how to make it stop. What little I've seen of other people's experiences with it on e.g. screen sharing calls mirrors my own. I saw someone the other day wrestling with Microsoft's AI stuff while editing a document and it was comically similar to Clippy trying to help but just fucking things up, except kinda worse because it was a lot less polite about it.

(And I develop "AI" tools at my day job right now...)

The startup I work at is doing the same strategy pivot, we’re integrating AI into every feature of the platform. Every textbox or input field has the option to generate the value from AI. Feature that no one used when it was a simple form with a button can now be done through our chatbot. We have two key product metrics for the entire company and one of them is how many AI tokens our users are generating.

My job is talking like this to but I don't understand why we need to keep any of the textboxes at all if the bot is populating everything.

AI tokens that you pay for?

Mostly the free ones we give every user, we’re just measuring usage of AI features

Notion customer here and their AI crap keeps interrupting my workflow. Pretty stupid move on their part because they have motivated me to ditch the subscription.

They used to be like a really easy to use collaborative wiki. And I used it for a couple distributed projects and loved that aspect.

But I'm guessing their growth was linear, and hard fought, after initial success over tools like Atlassian's which are annoying and expensive.

So to get back to hypergrowth, they had to stuff AI in every nook and cranny.

the sad part is that it wasnt entirely nonsensical to use AI to improve notion's use as a knowledge base but the way they actually used it was in the most hamfisted ways possible.

I'm a heavy Notion user and haven't once used the AI features. I use AI on a near-daily basis outside Notion, but it just isn't something I need from Notion. On the other hand at least it isn't that intrusive in Notion unlike in some other apps.

You kind of have to be or a competitor will come out being AI first and may get a bunch of funding

Just tried Notion AI to build me a mermaid diagram and it was totally useless. So probably not bothering with that again. I can write good enough English without it and I don’t want to sound like generic slop anyway.

Would strongly recommend avoiding notion. They have super scummy practices for billing, removing users from company account etc.

Just read a single interview by the CEO etc, they are all in on AI

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