“And the last thing is CPUs over GPUs. We've recently launched something at Notion called Workers. I don't think that the GPU is necessary for every job. A lot of the jobs that we have are actually serving discrete pieces of code. Like you don't need an LLM to turn a CSV into a PDF. You don't need an LLM to talk to Notion tool calls if we have a CLI. You definitely don't need an LLM to do deterministic SQL queries. This is where people become token poor very quick.”
Sarah Sachs, Manages Notion's core AI capabilities and infrastructure team. Head of AI at Notion, which makes the Custom Agents she discusses; Notion sells AI features and has reason to present them favorably.
Notion sells AI or agent tools or services, so it has a reason to publish flattering numbers about AI. The passage stays in the archive; read it with that in mind.
How this was checked
Checked against the source by a first reader, then confirmed independently by a second reader who fetched the source without seeing the first reader's notes (Independent review agent (Claude Sonnet), blind second pass from passage text and citation only, no repository access, 2026-11-04).
Exact match in the whisper transcript (about 16:57). No captions are available to cross-check.
How to cite this passage
Sarah Sachs (Notion), “Notion's Token Town”, AI Engineer (YouTube), 2026-07-23, at 16:57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I5W5QVAT8E Archived at https://the-ai-record.com/passages/notion-launched-workers-cpus-over-gpus-token-poor-2026
Context. Sachs is describing what Notion offers AI model labs in place of large spending commitments; 'that expertise' refers to Notion's evaluations of models on its own use cases.
Notion