Interfacing with AI, with Linus Lee of Notion

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
Everyone is talking about ChatGPT right now, but are you actually using it to the max? How do you use ChatGPT? It's an interview show where the people at the forefront of technology show you how they use ChatGPT in their work and their lives. Host Dan Shipper talks to programmers, writers, founders, academics, tech executives, and others to walk through all of their ChatGPT use cases, including historical chats, step-by-step.
They even use ChatGPT together live on the show, to build apps, analyze their leadership qualities, read more deeply, and do the best work of their lives. Listen to How Do You Use ChatGPT from Dan Shipper and the team at Every, wherever you get your podcasts.

**Linus Lee** (0:48)
The kind of interface that I'm eventually building towards is a tool that lets you edit text or work through ideas, not in the native space of words and characters and tokens, but in the space of actual meaning or features, where features can be anything from, is this a question, is this a statement, is this uncertain or certain, to topical things like, is this about computers versus plans, or to probably other kinds of features that we don't really even have words for.
I'm generally a pretty optimistic person about technology, as long as the way we package these things is more humanist, rather than just automate all of the things. You see companies situated at different points in the spectrum between, you want models to automate things in a way that takes away agency, i.e. replacement, or you want models that amplify. I think OpenAI is very much on the replacement side. Literally, their definition of, I think, AGI is something like a thing that can take over a single full human's job, where if you look at a company like Runway, a lot of their framing of usefulness is about extending that agency of what you want to express.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:48)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Linus Lee, AI product leader at Notion and AI explorer extraordinaire.
I followed Linus online for a couple of years now, fascinated by his many groundbreaking projects and his unique way of thinking about AI systems. From creating novel interfaces that visualize and manipulate generative models in their latent spaces, 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 also discussed the importance of spending time with raw 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 the high-level goal of better general reasoning, he emphasizes hallucination reduction, better instruction following, and cost efficiency.
We also speculate about the future, considering scenarios like models communicating with other models 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 me to engage more deeply with these systems, to build the tools I need to understand them, and to steer their development in a direction that deepens rather than diminishes human creativity and agency.
As always, if you find value in the show, please share it with others who might appreciate it. Particularly right now as we're establishing the new feed, a tweet or a comment on YouTube would be especially valuable. And of course, we invite you to reach out with feedback or suggestions on our website, cognitiverevolution.ai.
Now, please enjoy this deep dive into the art and science of exploring AI systems with Linus Lee of Notion AI. Linus Lee of Notion AI and general all-purpose AI explorer, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Linus Lee** (4:42)
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:45)