OpenAI among vendors that tune Notion's artificial intelligence model

Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao

Notion AI, the artificial intelligence-based writing assistant of productivity and note-taking application Notion, uses vendors like Microsoft-backed OpenAI to tune its model, CEO and co-founder of the company Ivan Zhao said.

The company introduced Notion AI for its writing and note-taking segment in February. Notion users can use it for improving their writing, summarising notes and so on.

When it was released, Zhao in a blog had clarified that user data will be encrypted, and that the company does not allow any partners or third parties "to use your data for training their models or any other purpose".

"So for Notion AI, there's not much training (of the model) going on. We use our vendors, and OpenAI is one of our vendors," Zhao said in an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol

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"Our agreement with them is that they cannot take Notion data to train their models. So, we can run their models, but that doesn’t mean they can take the data from Notion. It’s almost like when you run an analytics software," Zhao said.

Going forward, the company also plans to introduce artificial intelligence for its knowledge base and project management segments.

"So we’re one of the first major AI writing products on the market. We did a public release almost before everybody else. But we’re not stopping here. The writing is just the first product. As I mentioned, documents and notes are our first use case. (We have other use cases such as) knowledge base and product management. We need to bring AI to those use cases," Zhao told Moneycontrol.

Zhao said this in response to a query over how the company is planning to deal with competition with other AI-based productivity management platforms such as the recently launched Microsoft Loop.