It’s called Simile, and it was awarded $100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, the Journal says.
According to his website, Simile claims he is “developing a basic model that predicts human behavior in any situation, at any scale.”
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Joon Park, told the Journal in a little more detail how it works. Apparently AI agents are trained on chat-style interviews with real people, at which point the agents become “digital twins” or “digital clones” of their human counterparts. To ensure that the clones are accurate, real data of people’s behavior and consumer habits is added. Then, market insight can then be gained – apparently at least – by having market researchers talk to those “clones” or survey them.
As the Journal says, Simile customers are allowed to “ask infinite questions of their AI people.”
it ai people The idea may sound a little familiar.
is a famous imitation of consumerism – actually intended to be an imitation of consumerism, its creator later explained to The New Yorker. It’s called The Sims, and it’s a video game that simulates everyday reality.
While Sims is not mentioned in the Journal’s story about Simile, it is no secret that Simile took inspiration from it. A 2023 research paper co-authored by Park is about an attempt to simulate human behavior. The paper’s abstract states, “We instantiate generative agents to create an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty-five agents using natural language.”
The agents at the newspaper have immense desires, and they interact with each other without any interruption. The paper provides the following sample conversation that takes place at a grocery store inside the simulation:
Sam: Hey Tom, how’s it going?
Tom: Ok, thanks. What’s going on?
Sam: Well, I wanted to talk to you about something. I’m actually running for mayor in the upcoming local elections.
Tom: In fact? This is good news! Why are you running?
Sam: I have been involved in local politics for many years and I really feel like I can make a difference in our community. At the same time, I want to bring forward new ideas and perspectives.
A CVS executive named Mr. Narasimhan — job title: “vice president of enterprise customer experience and insights” — has been interacting with Simile’s simulated people, according to the Journal, and says the tool is “a really big unlock for us,” and that, “It’s not like I have to stop with how many questions. There’s no fatigue.”
For example, according to the Journal, Narasimhan mock polled people about pet medication, “finding that people do not consider giving medication to their pets a chore.” If true then it is very big.
Yet, apparently, CVS is about to expand its “roster” to a million simulated people and ask them questions on “store layout and new product design.”
Simile also has a partnership with Gallup – designed to simulate the experience of asking policy questions of a large group. On its website, there’s a sample of what it will look like once it’s working: essentially a chatbot prompting window that reads “What should I ask the group?” In gray font on text entry fields. Page offers, “Model decisions against real-world sentiment – transparent, replicable, and empirically validated.”
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