Built by someone who teaches

I'm Joseph Lawrence. I've spent twelve years in university classrooms. I have a master's in Biology, and I'm finishing a PhD in bioinformatics and neurodegenerative disease at the City University of New York Graduate Center. I've taught undergraduates at two CUNY campuses since 2020.

I also do research in mechanistic interpretability, the study of how language models represent information internally rather than treating them as black boxes. My current work is on attribution graphs in open-weight models. That research feeds directly into what I build. Understanding how a model arrives at an output is what makes it possible to build software that shows its evidence and its confidence, instead of asking you to take either on trust.

Teaching is what made me build this. The same thing happens every semester. Students who worked genuinely hard still do poorly, because the hours went into material that already felt familiar instead of the material that didn't. Almost nobody can tell the difference from the inside. Recognizing something and knowing it feel identical right up until the exam.

Sumi is built to assist learning, not replace it. It won't write your essay or sit your exam. It structures the material you already have, keeps an honest record of what you've actually retained, and takes some of the chaos out of running five classes at once, so you know what is due and what to study tonight.

I've also watched what the last few years of AI have done to studying. It's become very easy to hand an assignment over, get something back, submit it, and learn nothing from it. The assignment is finished, the grade is fine, and none of it is in your head when the exam comes.

So Sumi splits the work on purpose. It handles the organizing and the scheduling and keeps track of where you are. It leaves the recall to you, because recall is the part that builds memory.

It's also meant to be shared. Studying is less miserable and works better with other people, so the material you build can be worked through together instead of alone. And it gets more useful the longer you use it, because it has more of your history to work from.

Next is recorded lectures: capture the audio, get a transcript aligned to your notes, and be able to tap any line to hear the moment it came from. After that, handwriting and an iPad app, so the notes you take by hand enter the same system as everything else.

Questions, problems, or feature requests: support@sumichi.app. I read everything.

It's a company now, TenTwo Labs LLC in New York, but it's still one person. You can also read how generated material is kept honest.