Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jitl 634 days ago
(I work at Notion but not on AI)

There’s far more for Notion to lose “training customer data on AI” than for Notion to gain. Like if an AI feature ever disclosed private information of one customer to another, that would be a huge blow to the company.

The closest thing to that that makes sense for us is building “learn to rank” style search models to improve search results, but this is not usually considered “AI” and is typical for any product trying to make search good.

2 comments

For me, it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people. Even if your AI vomits some other user’s private data, it’ll be considered a glitch and will be forgiven because non-technical users does not panic or gets flame-baited because these are irrelevant to them.

That being said, I appreciate that you understand the risk, and want to believe that the people on the helm of the AI feature and people on the leadership also share your opinion.

On the contrary if Notion were to regurgitate one company’s business development strategy notes to another company, that would be much worse than a technical documentation leak! In my experience non-technical data usually much more important to users than technical data, non-technical users are much less understanding, and our community keeps very close eye out for bugs, leaks, changes in privacy policy, etc.
> it seems that most of the notion users in my circle(very small one) are non-technical people.

All the users in my circle are the opposite, they are all technical individuals. Largely developers for whatever reason.

I appreciate the response but once you get investors and shareholders those concerns are worthless.

If it's possible, it will eventually happen.