Lisa Rayle

Product person building with AI. Previously at Meta, MIT. Background in urban planning

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@sweatystartup We’re trying to teach our 6 year old to reflect on how these things make her feel so eventually when we take away the controls she makes good choices.

No idea if this will work or how long it will take.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@kareem_carr 100%. And with each new model release I have to recalibrate.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@atmoio Hard to tell if the arguments are resolved or if we just have a short attention span

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@LMSacasas Agree it would be naive to think we're not shaped by technology, but does that always have to be bad?

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@MikeyPesto I'd say local media was already buried. Would love to see AI help bring them back

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@p_millerd True, although I know some employees who are loving their life secretly working 5 hours and doing whatever they want the remaining 35

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

All I have to say is I'm really glad we're figuring this stuff out now, before my kid is old enough to have homework and tests

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores.

Across studies, a theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@omooretweets Hmmm, maybe people value their happiness and relationships more than productivity.

Anyway, I don’t believe consumer apps always fairly reveal people’s true preferences.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@DKThomp No one has yet invented an Oura ring for social relationships that actually works.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

Hot take: today's FDE's are tomorrow's IT department.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

Are any of these AI-generated books any good?

AI-generated books are quickly outnumbering non-AI books.

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

From literature to law to music, AI has lowered the skills and effort required for some work. These charts show how much the technology is changing five different fields https://t.co/A6HFXYhwsZ

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

This week for us.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@thede_plandude This is exactly what I didn’t know I needed! Love it

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

I think this is mostly correct: AI will change writing the same way photography changed painting.

HOWEVER, modern painting also resulted in minimalist stuff like Malevich's White on White, with critics declaring the "death of painting".

Also, the market for portrait painting totally collapsed and migrated to photography.

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

What if AI changes writing the way that photography changed painting? By Adam Kirsch. https://t.co/mcHEh371m4

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@emollick Agree, and chatbots are deceptive. It's intuitive to start, "just talk to it like a person" works. But to get a good answer you need to know what it can do and how hard to push it.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@NirZicherman What surprises me is how low the numbers are. Agree, it’s probably under-reported. And how recent is the survey?

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

Back when I was a data scientist, 80% of my time was data wrangling. That part of the job is gone, I'm happy to say.

In building It's One Banana last week, I handed Fable a genuine mess: pdfs, a historical dump in a totally different format, raw data buried in spreadsheets full of someone's old analysis. It sorted all of it - matched the accounts, recognized transfers.

AI's been good at this for a while, but the judgment Fable showed really felt like a step change.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

@emollick Yeah, it becomes very obvious when you're building apps that Claude's almost blind to what it creates. (Though to be fair, the bottom one doesn't look much like a gorilla if you haven't seen the top...)

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

I added the savings plan part on a whim, but it's my favorite part.

[Lisa Rayle @lisarayle_]

I've been meaning to review my household expenses for a while. Fable made it so much easier.

I built It's One Banana in just a couple of days. It's a personal spend tracker and optimizer that:

- ingests all our financial data from 10 different accounts
- wrangles the data into a spend tracking dashboard, reconciling transfers and reimbursements
- categorizes each transaction
- lets the user recategorize, and in doing so teaches the system
- flags subscriptions
- Bonus: recommends actions to save money, like swapping credit cards and checking utility rate plans.

What I learned building It's One Banana:

- Fable is "relentlessly proactive", as someone else pu it. I can give it vague direction and it just goes off and builds end-to-end.
- Fable generally has good judgment:
- It knew to build an audit tab where the user adjusts categories so the system learns for next time. It flagged low-confidence and uncategorized items. I didn't tell it to do this.
- Built a trends tab even though I didn't ask.
- Where its judgment failed:
- The synthetic data was totally unrealistic at first. For example, almost no spend on housing despite an apparent Bay Area residence, and no travel. I had to give it a persona and some direction.
- It still confidently made a lot of unstated assumptions. E.g., when I asked which credit cards would maximize savings, it assumed generic travel behavior, instead of looking at my actual receipts, even though it had access to those.
- Its writing style still sucks, probably even worse than Opus.

The public version is synthetic data and so reads as kind of generic. But for me personally, this really helped spot the specific low-hanging fruit for my family.