Molly O’Shea@MollySOShea1d ago

Do you think we’re living in a simulation? This Stanford PhD raised over $300M, now valued at $2B, backed by Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei), Andrej @karpathy, Greenoaks, & @IndexVentures, to build AI simulations of real people. Their Stanford research achieved 85%+ accuracy predicting human behavior. I sat down with Simile Co-Founder & CEO Joon Sung Park (@joon_s_pk) to get into it all. Simile (@simile_ai) builds real-world simulations with access to 40M+ real people across its global panel partnerships for companies liek Deloitte, Wealthfront, CVS & more to test major decisions. Joon completed his Stanford PhD advised by Michael Bernstein & Percy Liang, now his co-founders, & is the first author of the 'Generative Agents' paper. That paper introduced Smallville, a simulated town where 25 LLM-powered agents lived, worked, & socialized on their own. Recorded at Index Ventures in San Francisco, we talked about Elon Musk’s simulation theory & whether human behavior can actually be predicted.. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Joon Sung Park, Co-Founder & CEO at Simile (00:44) Do we live in a simulation? (04:01) The AI town that planned its own Valentine’s party (06:46) Predicting human behavior with 85% accuracy (11:09) Is human behavior predictable? (13:40) What really drives human decisions? (15:45) How Simile simulates customers & markets (20:05) Why big companies want simulated customers (21:31) Digital twins & a panel of 40M real people (22:51) Who actually answers polls???? (24:22) How Simile keeps bad data out (29:29) What Simile predicted about this episode (33:34) The EV campaign that looked perfect until it wasn’t (37:02) Simulating climate change, AGI & UBI (39:06) What happens when you simulate your interviewer (40:13) Raising $300M at a $2B valuation (44:54) Simulation is in its GPT-4 era (49:43) What the most successful people have in common (53:58) The “now what?” moment that ends careers (55:25) The $15B question