Recently, Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao published an in-depth article titled "Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds" on the company's official blog. In the tech hub of San Francisco, despite the constant discussion surrounding Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Ivan Zhao pointed out that billions of global knowledge workers have yet to truly feel its impact. He used historical metaphors like steel and steam engines to profoundly analyze how AI is reshaping individuals, organizations, and entire economies. Ivan Zhao believes we are currently in the throes of a technological transition; "the most popular form of AI today looks exactly like the Google search box of yesteryear." People are, as Marshall McLuhan said, "driving into the future using only the rearview mirror." At the individual level, change is already visible among programmers. Using his partner Simon as an example, Zhao described a leap from a "bicycle for the mind" to a "car": "Walk past his desk, and you'll see him directing three or four AI programming agents simultaneously. These AIs not only input faster, but they also possess thinking capabilities... He has become a manager of infinite minds." At the organizational level, Zhao compares AI to "the steel of organizations." Just as steel allowed skyscrapers to突破 the height limitations of brick and wood structures, AI will break the bottlenecks of organizational scale. "AI is the steel of organizations... Human communication no longer needs to bear the load: a two-hour weekly meeting can be compressed into a five-minute asynchronous recap... Companies will achieve truly lossless scale expansion." Simultaneously, the industry is still in its "water wheel era," merely grafting AI onto old processes rather than fundamentally redesigning workflows as was done in the age of steam engines. At the economic level, Zhao predicts that the knowledge economy will undergo a transformation from "Florence" to a "supercity." Existing organizations are like "Florence built with stone and wood," constrained by human scale; AI will construct "Tokyo-style" organizations—"collaborative networks housing thousands of agents and humans, workflows operating uninterrupted across time zones." While this change may bring "illegibility" and a sense of disorientation, it will be exchanged for unprecedented scale and speed. Concluding the article, Ivan Zhao revealed progress on Notion's internal experiments: "In addition to 1,000 employees, there are now over 700 agents handling repetitive work... and this is just the beginning." He called on the industry to abandon rearview mirror thinking, stating, "Steel. Steam. Infinite minds. The next skyline is out there, waiting for us to build it." Productivity software company Notion is a San Francisco-based super unicorn that has recently striven to position itself as an "all-in-one app" for the workplace, challenging the dominance of Microsoft and Google in the productivity suite market. Notion continuously rolls out new AI features aimed at creating an integrated work platform, offering users a comprehensive solution ranging from note-taking to knowledge management.
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