The Roundup

Yesterday was anything but an average Sunday for Twitter. But today is a great day for all of you productivity junkies. We’ve got a few launches we know will tickle your fancy.

We’ve seen AI do a lot over the past few years, from creating houses out of thin air, to generating weird and wonderful profile images, to becoming your second brain for work.

Now Notion has dropped its latest feature: an AI assistant built directly into your workspace. Notion AI is currently in Alpha, but it can handle quite a lot already. It’s kind of like a new co-worker that lives in Notion and saves you a ton of time or helps you spend it more wisely.

What it can do: Co-Founder Ivan Zhao gave a taste of Notion AI in a demo video, which included summarizing those long Zoom meetings, instant language translation, automatically generating a list of ideas about any topic to get those creative juices flowing, and even being your personal editor.

What we’re watching for: We’ve seen A LOT of AI writers launch over the last few years. What will it mean for them, now that workspaces like Notion are building AI directly into their products? Google, of course, already integrates some AI into your docs (thanks, autocomplete), but it's only a matter of time until we see giants like Google with AI integration at Notion’s scale.

Notion AI is currently using a waitlist but Notion said it's giving more people access every day.

Steve Wozniak says he hasn’t been this excited about an innovation since Apple II.

He’s talking about Air (via Cameo video for the launch of Air for Teams).

Let’s back up. Air launched three years ago, looking to fix clunky cloud storage experiences. “Three years, and nearly 100,000+ users later, I feel confident in saying: we found the better way,” co-founder Shane Hegde shared.

If you’ve been seeing more of Air lately, it's probably because the team closed a $10M "Operator Round" in January and announced plans to use the capital to accelerate the company's go-to-market motion. Prior to that, Air said over 90% of its growth was organic thanks to traction within the D2C community in New York and word-of-mouth. Many of those early adopters chimed in to praise the simple UI.

For those who are new to it, Air isn’t just storage — it’s similar to Notion and Airtable in that it’s a cloud-collaboration tool, plus it's a digital asset management system (DAM). Users can import videos and images and Air automates organization with image and color recognition. Boards help teams collaborate and distribute content, and the recent update adds integrations that make the process even easier.

Real-time sync means that your assets stay up to date while you work with editing tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and more. Slack integrations help you work faster. And this might be what Woz is most excited about: “Air flow” lets you view, search, and manage your “Airpsace” right from Apple’s Finder. There are also saved filters and new private spaces and permission levels are coming soon.

“Air wouldn’t be what it is without our community,” ends Hegde, who is asking what you want to see next.

Last week felt pretty gloomy for those in tech. And we’re not referring to the sweater weather. 

Several companies announced new layoffs, including giants like Lyft, Stripe, OpenDoor, and Chime. And let’s not forget Elon Twitter is cutting 50% of its employees (although there are rumors of the company asking some of them to come back already). 

Why is this happening? A few reasons. 

• The obvious one is the recession. Recent earning reports are sending red signals to investors, making it more important than ever for companies to focus on increasing their profit margins and cutting costs. 
• But why so many this week? Twitter chatter hints that Musk’s plan to cut 3,700 jobs last Friday gave companies the opportunity to do the same, thus dividing (and taking) some of the attention from them.
• Another theory we’ve seen floating around is that the holiday season approaching presumably makes the transition period easier. It also fits California’s WARN Act window of time for announcing mass layoffs.

What now? It’s hard to say how much longer it will be before we see the light at the end of the economic tunnel or whether layoffs and hiring freezes will continue. What’s clear is that, despite the noise made by big tech, many companies out there are still hiring. Flexport, the logistics startup, is planning to double its engineering headcount in a 2023 hiring spree. 

In the meantime: some tools to help you spot open positions. 

• AI Jobs lets you apply to 1000+ jobs in AI and machine learning. 
• This one aggregates fully location-independent jobs.
• Dream Job Hub is a step-by-step execution guide. Like mission control for job applications.