Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park
In a Nutshell
Joon Sung Park founded Simile to build large-scale simulations of human behavior using generative agents that combine LLMs with memory, planning, and reflection. Their core advance is a validation study showing these simulations predict real people's actions at 85% of human self-consistency accuracy, enabling companies like CVS to run concept tests, market research, and multi-agent scenario modeling without field experiments. Park argues this technology can extend beyond commercial use to solve fundamental social science questions, potentially transforming economics, policy, and collective decision-making.
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Joon Sung Park is inspired by science fiction depictions of technologically mature societies that feature two pillars: AGI and simulations that guide society. He sees an opportunity to build the simulation pillar today, a conviction built over years of research that he would not have held even five years ago.
Simile is an applied AI lab building simulations of human behavior and societies. Joon Sung Park is founder and CEO.
In April 2023 at Stanford, the team ran the Smallville project. The core observation was that large language models encode substantial human behavior from training data on the web and social media. When prompted with specific situations, models generate interesting micro-behaviors. This capability was the missing ingredient for complex agentic behavior.
Smallville created generative agents by pairing generative AI models with memory, planning, and reflection mechanisms. The simulation featured a game town with 25 agents. Each agent had a persona description and would wake up, follow routines, go to work, form relationships, and generate emergent phenomena such as parties.
The simulation was set the day before Valentine's Day. Isabella, a cafe owner, decided to host a Valentine's Day party, gathered materials, invited customers, and on the day of the event an immersive party formed with agents attending. Some invited agents forgot to attend. One agent named Claus, who received an invite, brought his crush on a date to the party.
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