Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedSimon Last: preference
15 Apr 2026 Latent Space Notion’s Token Town: 5 Rebuilds, 100+ Tools, MCP vs CLIs and the Software Factory Future — Simon Last & Sarah Sachs of Notion
“We literally change our tools every single day and if we notice an issue, we will, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll fix the problem.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Simon Last
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 15 Apr 2026
- Publisher
- Latent Space
Transcript context
…other thing that um, reminded me about fine tuning that I think you and I have aligned on is that. Our tools change really frequently, and right now we spend a lot of time rethinking and building tools for capability and fine tuning a model, um, to understand your tool. Like we don’t have legal expertise or coding expertise. So if we were to fine tune a model, it would either be expertise about the enterprise and you know, we have ZDR, no data retention offerings for those enterprises. So we’d have to really rethink how we structure if an enterprise wanted to opt into that or it would be fine tuning and better capability on navigating our tools that doesn’t match with the velocity with which we create new tools. And so it actually really slow us down, um, to have a model that was fine tuned on our tools because we’d have to retrain it and cut a new model every time we did that. And that’s not how we’re set up right now. Um, particularly with the way that we’re changing our, I, I guess we could fine tune a model to like search for tools. It’s just. The, the amount of time it takes to do that, ship it, have the right system, you’re basically making a bet against a frontier capability not serving that, and the time it takes you to build it. Mm-hmm. And that, that time lag hasn’t happened for us yet. It hasn’t been, yeah. It’s just the wrong trade off. I think. It’s just like you want Yeah. We literally change our tools every single day and if we notice an issue, we will, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll fix the problem. I think a, a good way to think about it, I think is pretty fruitful, is like, don’t focus too much on training. I would think of that as like, that’s an implementation detail. Like what’s the outer loop, right? Like, like the outer loop is you have a model and then some harness or, or system where it’s interacting with the system that needs to work. And you know, if there’s a problem, the way to solve the problem isn’t necessarily to train a model. It’s like, oh, maybe there’s just a bug in one of the tools. Right? And actually 99% of the time it’s a bug in one of the tools, right? And so just fix the bug. And then the outer loop thing that’s really fruitful to think about is like, how can you improve your, your velocity and robustness? Making really good tools, making a good harness, you know, like, like verifying it works. Hmm. The one place that we do invest more in model turning now necessarily though, is actually in retrieval because, um, we’re at a point right now in our business and enterprise, our AI enabled plans where. The search load and the search traffic. Majority of it’s coming from agents, not humans. And so for every query that’s hitting our elastic search or our vector indices, they’re not coming from humans. And the queries are structured differently. And what’s returned has a different re requirement. Positional ranking matters less, but top K retrieval mode matters more. Right.…
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