Michael Taylor, creator of Rally and co-author of a book on prompt engineering, joins to discuss his innovative AI tool for simulating customer responses. He shares how AI can create diverse virtual focus groups, enhancing customer research without the risks associated with traditional methods. Michael explains the role of AI in generating tailored content, such as headlines, and emphasizes the importance of effective prompt engineering. With insights on using AI creatively, he showcases Rally's capabilities, demonstrating its value for market testing.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
GPT-4 Personality Test
Dan Shipper used GPT-4 to analyze his tweets and create a personality profile.
GPT-4 then took a personality test as him, scoring similarly to Shipper and outperforming his close contacts.
insights INSIGHT
AI Customer Interviews
LLMs excel at simulating customer interviews for product development.
Prompting them with industry and demographic information yields surprisingly accurate insights into customer thinking and behavior.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Meta-Media Debate
Michael Taylor built a script to automate persona simulation after a successful experiment with Every.
Dan Shipper, initially skeptical, changed his mind about using "meta" in Every's description after seeing the script's results.
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This book provides a solid foundation in generative AI, focusing on the principles of prompt engineering to effectively work with AI models like GPT-4 and Stable Diffusion. It covers the structure of AI model interactions, transforming application problems into model training domains, and the influence of LLM and diffusion model architectures. The book includes practical examples and advanced techniques for text and image generation, as well as building AI-powered applications in domains such as natural language processing, text and image generation, and code.
Michael Taylor has perfected the art of getting AI to speak in tongues. He’s taught it to mimic the voices of your customers—so you can see how they would respond before you ship.
Michael is the creator of Rally, a market research tool that lets you simulate an audience of AI personas. He built a simulator that lets us A/B test Every’s headlines on an audience that mimics the real Hacker News audience. It’s become a part of my writing workflow, and I love it because you test your assumptions quickly, cheaply, and without any of the risks of putting something out into the world.
Besides Rally, Michael co-authored a book on prompt engineering for O’Reilly, and he writes a column for Every about managing AI tools like you would people. In a past life, he founded a growth marketing agency which he grew to 50 people and sold in 2020. One of the reasons I’m drawn to Michael’s work is because he has a tinkerer’s mindset. He’s always exploring the limits of what a new technology can do, and what he’s into today, everyone else will likely discover six months later. We spent an hour talking about using language models to judge your work, best practices for assessing an AI’s performance, and Michael’s flow inside Cursor. He also demos Rally live on the show, testing three different potential headlines for an Every article.
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