It’s an interesting question, and I’ll try to answer with a tangential anecdote.
In the early days of Supernotes, we were targeting students, and one thing that came up a lot at the time (esp when we were talking to VCs) was the idea of building a notecard marketplace. The basic idea being that students could buy and sell their notes to each other on Supernotes, which would be the ideal platform for this given how easily you can integrate the cards of others into your own personal “system” on Supernotes. And clearly there is actually a market for this, as students are buying cliff notes / study guides / etc all the time.
However we were unenthusiastic about the idea, because (having spent a lot of time researching the problem), we knew that this was behavior was probably counter-productive for most students. Struggling students see the student that is doing quite well and after a surreptitious look at the successful student’s notes think “wow, those notes look great. They’re so thorough and so well-organized. If only I could study from those notes I could probably do just as well. I’ll ask if I can photocopy their notes tomorrow after class”. Of course that’s not what happens in practice. The reason the other student is doing well is in part because they are creating those notes themselves, and forcing themselves to synthesize and internalize that information as part of the note-creation process.
Many of our current users don’t know this, but this is actually the origin of the card length limit on Supernotes as well. We designed it in the hope that it would encourage people to think more about how they are structuring content, and that by breaking it apart, users would be better able to retain the information that they are recording on Supernotes without actually having to rely on Supernotes itself.
Anyway, I think the parallels with using AI for the same purpose are strong. For various uses, the current crop of LLMs can be genuinely helpful, e.g. if you want to turn a series of bullet points into a polite email quickly. However when it comes to anything like a “second brain”, I think these features often give the appearance of being helpful while actually doing the opposite, just like copying the notes off the smart kid. In general, the goal of Supernotes will always be to try to build features that really truly make you more productive, instead of creating a productive facade. We actually built some GPT-3 powered features two years ago, but ultimately decided not to release them as we found the signal-to-noise ratio was much too low for our comfort.
That being said, we do think there are some places that LLM integration would be genuinely helpful (esp now that there are more and more models available and the best ones actually perform quite well), we just want to be very careful about where and why we add such features. Clearly many other products in the space feel differently, but bandwagoning has never been in our genes.
So please continue to suggest ML-powered features, as we are always ready to try out new ideas! Now that we have the “Feature Preview” system, we will be a bit more likely to just push things out and see if people like them rather than relying entirely on our own standards of quality to judge if something should be released.