The reputation of public opinion polls is not in a good place right now – or at least This was not the case before the 2024 electionand it is hard to imagine that the situation has improved much. New company It was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal asks a bold question hey, what if we replace all that with AI?
It’s called Simile, and it’s been awarded $100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, the Journal says.
According to his websiteSimile claims to “develop a fundamental model that predicts human behavior in any situation, at any scale.”
Joon Park, the company’s co-founder and CEO, explained to the Journal a little more about how it works. Apparently, AI agents conduct conversation-style interviews with real people, where the agents become “digital twins” or “digital clones” of their human counterparts. Actual data from people’s behavior and consumer habits is added to make sure the clones are accurate. Then, market research can be obtained, at the very least, by having market researchers talk to or survey those “clones.”
Similar customers are allowed to, as the Journal puts it, “ask AI humans endless questions.”
This AI people the idea may sound a little familiar.
There is a famous simulation of consumerism – in fact intended to be a parody of consumerismits creator would later explain to the New Yorker. It’s called The Sims, and it’s a video game that simulates quotidian reality.
Although Sims was not mentioned in the Journal’s story about Simile, it’s no secret that Simile was inspired by him. A A research paper from 2023 co-authored by Parkis about trying to imitate human behavior. “We deploy generative agents to populate 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 paper’s abstract reads.
Agents on paper have a wide range of requests and interact with each other without being on rails. Paper presents the following example conversation that takes place in a grocery store within the simulation:
Sam: Hey Tom, how’s it going?
Tom: Well, thank you. what’s up
Sam: Well, I wanted to talk to you about something. In fact, I have put forward my candidacy for mayor in the upcoming local elections.
Tom: Really? This is great news! why are you running
Sam: I have been involved in local politics for years now and I feel that I can make a difference in our society. Plus, I want to bring new ideas and perspectives to the table.
A CVS executive named Sri Narasimhan—job title: “vice president of enterprise customer experience and insights”—contacts Simile’s simulated humans, according to the Journal, and says the tool is “a really big unlock for us,” saying, “I don’t have to stop with how many questions I ask. There’s no fatigue.”
For example, Narasimhan surveyed simulated people about pet medication and found that “people don’t consider giving medication to their pets a chore,” the Journal reported. If true, great.
However, it appears that CVS is about to expand its “list” to a hundred thousand simulated people and survey them on “store layouts and new product designs.”
Simile also has a partnership with Gallup designed to simulate the experience of asking a large group a policy question. On his websitehere’s an example of what this will look like once it’s working: essentially “What should I ask the group?” chatbot alert window with the words in gray font above the text input field. The page offers “model decisions against real-world sentiment – transparent, repeatable and empirically validated.”
