Simon Last studied computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park, and interned in software engineering roles, including at Nebula, Inc. and the Space Telescope Science Institute, before joining Ivan Zhao's early-stage project in 2013. As co-founder and CTO of Notion Labs, he was central to the company's 2015 rebuild in Kyoto, Japan, where he and Zhao rewrote the product from the ground up after running out of funding and laying off their team.
Last has since led Notion's engineering and product strategy, and became the primary voice behind Notion AI. He has said the team had been informally watching generative AI since 2021, but that early access to GPT-4 in the fall of 2022 was the real turning point — convincing him the model could genuinely reason rather than just autocomplete text. Under his technical leadership, Notion AI launched in private alpha in November 2022 and went generally available in February 2023, later expanding into Q&A search, AI Autofill, AI Meeting Notes, and — with Notion 3.0 in 2025 — autonomous AI agents built on a multi-model architecture drawing on several AI providers.
