AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search
Notion released its AI features. Like most AI-powered-document tools, the value proposition is that the AI can generate content for you.
We use Notion for the bulk of our knowledge management at CodePen. I have no use for an AI that can write for me. If I add anything to our knowledge base, it will directly stem from my specific expertise around the product, our processes, or my own experience. If a bot can write for me, what is the point of me writing in the first place? Or being on the team?
What I would use the shit out of, though, is a chatbot that has been trained on all the information in the CodePen knowledge base. Have it suck in all the meeting notes, project board cards, and weekly reports, and then be able to answer questions about the content (and provide links to the original docs).
I have a similar desire for the personal notes in my Obsidian vault. Getting back to the information I’ve saved in there requires me to remember the file name, tag, or the correct search term to pull up the text I’m looking for. I’d love to ask the vault questions and have it figure out the most relevant information to provide an answer without me having to use specific search terms.
There’s been a lot of hype around AI-written content. If you ask me, if there’s one thing we don’t need more of on the internet, it is more soulless content written for “SEO” purposes, with enough wordcount to inject ads between. At the same time, using Google search has been a terrible experience for years, thanks to the aforementioned content. I just want good search.
Comments
alex
March 8, 2023 at 3:28 PM
i have an idea for that that i’m working on. unfortunately i’m a shit programmer so it’s taking some time.
Pablo Mendes
March 8, 2023 at 9:40 PM
I’m with you on that. At Kailua Labs we’ve been building a search API for developers that want something that deeply understands your content and “just works”. LMK if you’d like to try it out.
aglaia
March 9, 2023 at 6:31 AM
argh completely agree! but as always, we come up against a wall with the challenge being access to private data to be able to even build such tools, and then there's preserving that privacy for people...
have succeeded in solving the data privacy problem, and have started with a little less daunting semantic search on your own data before getting to fine tuning an LLM on your data. ping me if you want to try it out.
but still, dealing with the strong imagination of LLMs is an issue to overcome...
but we have some promising projects in the pipeline - stay tuned ;)
Yuval Steuer
March 9, 2023 at 10:22 AM
I litterally started building gerev.ai because of notion and confluence search feature. Everything is public on twitter.com/yuvalsteuer.
3ch0
March 10, 2023 at 1:18 AM
Neeva (https://neeva.com/ ) and Gibiru ( https://gibiru.com/ ) and swisscows ( https://swisscows.com/en ) and Qwant ( https://www.qwant.com/ ) are all good choices imo.
Amogh Sarda
March 13, 2023 at 11:55 PM
You're spot on. I think content retrieval is a more interesting problem to solve than content creation - but of course, I'm biased.
We're working on exactly this with https://eesel.app. It plugs into your knowledge base and automatically organises it. We were Fast Company's top new apps of 2022.
We're now adding an AI layer on top so you can chat with your company knowledge. That's in pilot now :)
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