Opinion polls aren’t looking very good right now, at least not right before the 2024 election, and it’s hard to imagine that the situation has improved much. A startup recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal asks bold questions: Hey, what if we replaced all that with AI?
It’s called Simile, and the magazine reports it has secured $100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures.
According to its website, Simile claims to “develop foundational models that predict human behavior in any situation and at any scale.”
Joon Park, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told the Journal in a little more detail how this will work. Apparently, the AI agent is trained in chat-style interviews with real people, at which point the agent becomes a “digital twin” or “digital clone” of its human counterpart. Real data from people’s behavior and consumer habits is added to ensure the clones are accurate. Market researchers can then talk to and survey those “clones,” at least ostensibly to gain market insight.
As the Journal puts it, Simile’s customers can “ask the AI experts endless questions.”
this AI people This idea may sound a little familiar.
There’s a famous simulation of consumerism that was actually intended to be a parody of consumerism, as its creator later explained to The New Yorker. It’s called The Sims, and it’s a video game that simulates everyday reality.
Although the Journal article about Simile doesn’t mention The Sims, it’s no secret that Simile draws inspiration from it. A 2023 research paper co-authored by Park is about efforts to simulate human behavior. “We instantiate generative agents to build an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of 25 agents using natural language,” the paper’s abstract states.
The agents in the paper have overarching desires and interact with each other without riding on rails. This paper provides the following sample conversation that occurs in a simulated grocery store.
Sam: Hi Tom, how are you doing?
Tom: Good, thank you. what happened?
Sam: Well, there was something I wanted to talk about. Actually, I am planning to run for mayor in the upcoming local election.
Tom: Really? That’s great news! why are you running?
Sam: I have been involved in local politics for many years and I truly feel that I can make a difference in my community. Additionally, I would like to incorporate new ideas and perspectives.
According to the publication, a CVS executive named Sri Narasimhan (whose title is “VP of Enterprise Customer Experience and Insights”) has been interacting with Simile’s mock reps and says the tool is “a really big relief for us,” and that “no matter how many questions you ask, it doesn’t mean you have to stop. It’s not tiring.”
For example, Narasimhan asked simulated people about their pet’s medications and found that “people don’t think of giving their pets medication as a hassle,” the magazine reported. Huge if true.
Nevertheless, CVS apparently intends to expand its “roster” to 100,000 mock employees and ask questions about “store layout and new product design.”
Simile is also partnered with Gallup and is designed to simulate the experience of asking policy questions to large groups. Their website has a sample of what this looks like when it works. It’s basically a chatbot prompt window with the words “What should I ask the group?” Appears in gray font above the text input field. The page proposes “model decisions based on real-world emotions – transparent, reproducible, and empirically validated.”
