Sarah Sachs
@sarahmsachs
846 Following 9.2K Followers
Doing some research: what are the best ways you've managed AI cost governance at your company? How do you set limits and rates that correlate to productivity of use? What would you want to see in a product?
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Rumpelstiltskin of AI Velocity here.
Recently shipped a bunch of under-the-hood improvements to make @NotionHQ agents more dependable!
→ Stalled runs dropped to 0.17%
→ Unexpected errors dropped to 0.34%
→ 99.91% of responses now complete successfully
A lot of invisible engineering so agents work better for you every day. And our work here isn’t done!
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Today we're sharing the Notion Knowledge Board.
We get to observe a wide range of real-world AI tasks at @NotionHQ: meeting follow-ups, support tickets, sales pipeline updates, market research, all the good stuff. Knowledge board is a live, ongoing eval of how models handle real knowledge work measured on live anonymized traffic and scored by an ensemble judge we built in collaboration with researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI.
The takeaway is the tradeoffs: cost per task variance is high, and some of the fastest models are also very capable. The right model genuinely depends on your work.
We will update as new models ship:
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AI should reduce workflow friction, not add another chatbot.
@sarahmsachs (Head of AI @ Notion) on moving from isolated assistance to durable agent workflows built around a shared system of record.
From the Token Billionaires Lounge, presented by @cerebras and @aiDotEngineer.
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Being a millennial is chatting with Fmr SF Mayor Willie Brown, and immediately bonding over our love of his Princess Diaries cameo 25 years ago.
one shot your knoweldge workflows
If you want it done right the first time, hand it to an Opus model (lowest undo rate). Great for the hard stuff… like work that spans four tools.
Plug in Salesforce, PostHog, Hex, or any tool via MCP. Ask for a report, and you get analysis, interactive charts, and writing you’d send straight to your team.
Near-Fable-level work at half of the cost 🫡
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Heard ya’ll are into open weight models? Kimi K3 is now available in Notion.
Hosted by Fireworks, a US-based provider.
Releasing the first two mins of this video which is just me insisting the audience sit closer, which I completely stand by but was not planning on being recorded.
Now Live: @sarahmsachs' keynote from @NotionHQ's Token Town!
- The Supplier-Competitor Trap
- Win on Product, Not Tokens
- The "AI Switzerland" Approach
- Efficiency Over Complexity
- Security and Orchestration
link in reply!
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Excited to share that the awesome @ZeroEntropy_AI
team joined @NotionHQ
We have already been collaborating for a long time. now we are working even closer. Anyone who can make search ranking 85% faster is a happy addition to the Notion team :)
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All bachelorette parties can be put into three buckets: Love Island, Survivor, or Real Housewives. Prove me wrong.
Been living on a diet of Diet Coke and Skinny Pop for 30 years, and ya'll are looking like fools with parasitic diarrhea.
silo’d data kills agents. @NotionHQ is working, and agents are learning to lean on it more and more.
ps fixed the scale @paulg
Notion is an applied AI company that helps you do your life’s work with your team.
We went from experiencing an early release of GPT 4 a few years ago to re-writing our entire harness multiple times to be legible to both humans and agents.
And for most companies this would be a huge challenge.
But because so much of our work was based off of our primitives (text blocks, images, databases etc.), we were able to "leapfrog into the agentic tool calling world because those primitives are exactly what AI is building on top of."
Our AI lead @sarahmsachs is working to make sure Notion is a tool for builders to collaborate and create in.
Because "if we invest really well in those primitives and the ability to edit [them], the [Notion] agent can be unleashed" to solve some of knowledge work’s most complicated problems.
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The other day @colebemis asked me if I thought Notion was a cult. My answer was I’m so deep I have no way to answer that as a reliable narrator.
But that’s kind of the point. To work here is to believe it. Which means every conversation and debate is high trust, because we all have the same red-stained teeth.
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In our experience, Kool-Aid flowing is one of the best indicators of real magic at a company. For all the folks picking where to go next out there, here’s what we look for:
• Evidence they’re winning. Revenue definitely. But also early headliner customers (Turbopuffer, Baseten, Stripe are all great at highlighting their’s), known talent on the early team (Pierre Computer, OpenAI, Anthropic, Thinking Machines all have notably stacked early crews), and (especially if pre-revenue) accolades that industry leaders pay attention to (Physical Intelligence winning the Robot Olympics).
• A mission that matters to you. You’ll feel pride in your bones making this thing happen.
• Zaggy vision for the world. The best companies to join are non-consensus and right. Industry experts laughed Etched out of the room. Anthropic was seen as too soft and safety-focused. Do you believe in the future a company is building?
• Founder aura. Do you feel the pull to impress them and be in their midst? That counts for a lot… because you will have to be.
• Internal stage for excellent work. Does this company have a way they regularly elevate folks inside for doing interesting things, making things, doing deals? How high is the bar for what they feature at All Hands? What earns a Slack shout out from the CEO? Will you have constant visibility to learn from your highest performing teammates - and maybe become one, too?
• External platforms encouraged. Do you see people at the company tweeting about their work? On stages at conferences? Hosting their own events? Writing blog posts? Think @jeff_weinstein at Stripe. @ryolu_ at Cursor. @sarahmsachs at Notion. @oneill_c at Baseten. It’s a signal the company invests in people and their ideas.
• Rituals. Raises eyebrows on the outside, beloved on the inside. The best kind of cult. Vercel wears all black. Hundreds of cursors swarm Figma All-Hands slides as they’re being presented. Stripes used to run up Bernal Hill and played Werewolf in the evenings. Sub-20 Notion ate heaping piles of pasta every Friday at the same restaurant (and yet never needed a nap). Memories are sticky.
• Strong merch game. Unusual swag people actually want to wear - a sign of deeper care and creativity. Our recent favorite: Gumloop has people bring in their favorite they’d wear everyday if they could and get it embroidered on the spot.
• Culture heads indulged. Those folks who want to make the place awesome are told to “go for it!” Ben Barry churning out posters at early Facebook (that we can all still recite). Back in the day Dropbox’s famed Blackops squad stocked in-office karaoke studios, made an employee holiday catalog full of odd offerings. Good energy begets good energy.
• Other people are telling the story. The most honest reviews you’ll get of a place are outside-in, but they come in all forms. Andrej Karpathy tweeting. 100 community members sharing what they built. Customers name dropping the company on stage. The timeline’s inner circle commenting on product launches. See: who responded when Midjourney Medical went live. Join a company that makes friends. Its network will be yours.
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Evals are incredibly important to Notion.
"If we were to ever say what does Notion need to be uniquely good at? This representative eval set should be harness agnostic that we would use to train or evaluate that."
"It’s a core competency that every company needs to own to differentiate themselves in our perspective. And in order to scale your company, it’s very important in the way that unit tests and CI have been important in software engineering for a very long time.” @sarahmsachs
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Being a woman in your early 30s means having an emotional support group text where we all report our first grey hairs.
hot take. "When AGI" is a navel gazing exercise for about 99% of the people who talk about it.
"We are not in the business of committing to saying we delivered AGI. We are in the business of delivering work and value to our customers. And most of our customers do not care if we've hit a definition of AGI or not. They care if their ARRs increasing, if their SaaS sprawl is decreasing and their seat based pricing makes sense to them."
Talking about AGI as an applied AI company is a distraction. “It’s very flashy, it’s very interesting and it derives no user value”
@sarahmsachs
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More work than ever happens through Notion software factories. Notion is also doing more work than ever. Using software factories to address user feedback and polish creates an SDLC that was formerly impossible. Long ago are the days of an oft-abandoned backlog that inevitably gets nuked and reset every 6 months. We've changed the way we work and our customers are the first to benefit.
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Engineering teams require focus now more than ever.
We’ve changed the way we solve for paper cuts in the product while maintaining our speed of shipping:
"The second [a bug] comes through Slack it triggers an agent that figures out the right team to send it to. That team’s custom agent will then do a first pass at a task on Claude.
We’ll find similar customer feedback bugs if they exist and then tag an on call engineer where they just review a bunch of PRs” - @sarahmsachs
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HTML? More like H-T-M-Hell yeah.
