Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI

Today we have June in the podcast, excited to kick this one off, very exciting company. I want to kick off and I see the question, you know, talk us through the story of your life. How have you gotten here? Yeah, for sure. So we're excited to be here, a story about my life. So I was born in Korea and I lived there for good 11 years or so of my life. And then my family moved to Boston so we moved when I was 11. And my parents were doctors, so they were basically going through their post-actual studies. My dad was a surgeon, so he was doing his sabbatical years actually at the Boston Children's Hospital. So I grew up there, not too close to tech, actually. I was very much like, you know, music, fantasy, painting, like that kind of guy. I actually got into painting a little bit later in high school, but that's what I used to do. And then I grew up mostly in the east coast after Korea. So I lived good number of years in New Hampshire and then I went to college in Pennsylvania. And I got into more of this tech scene in college. So I was originally trained to be an artist. I actually thought that would be my professional career. So I wasn't a hobby. It was actually like, hey, let's make living out of this. And then gradually I got really interested in this idea of, hey, the greatest artist often creates their own medium. And the best medium that we had available today was actually in computation. So I decided to go deeper into that and one thing's led to another and obviously we can go deeper into this. But I decided that research was something that gradually that I got interested in. And here I am. So there's obviously a lot that you packed into the research components. You had one of the best papers in 2023, which was the Gerative Agents paper, commonly known as the Smallville paper. We feel free to call back to anything else that you mentioned. But most people would have heard of you from this obviously. Do you have any statistics of how many people have like read it? Archive gives you something, right? Some stats. Yeah. It's a good question. How many people have read it? I'm actually not sure. I know. I mean, we do keep track of the number of citations, which I know is going up quite fast, but we got the Googles call and it made a bigger hit and it was actually a pretty instrumental paper. It was like one that got cited so many times. It is frequently like when people ask what is the best paper of the year, like basically very recently, it's this one. I thought the memory component was pretty underrated, you know, like very good early memory system. But yeah, one of the biggest papers, you know, yeah, so maybe I can talk a little bit about how this particular paper came together. So when I got into research, it was back in 2020 when I started my PhD program at Stanford. And that was the year when we were about to get GPD 3.3 to be available. So we already had GPD 2 and you could sense that there's this new class of models that was just becoming available in the market. And the thing got very intrigued and the general consensus was what is this motor actually going to be useful for anything? It's really strange that these models are not trying to do any particular task. But we decided to take a bath. So a large group of scholars at Stanford, and it was actually led by one of my co-founders, Person Leon, came together and coined foundation models, coined the term foundation model. We wrote this paper where that term came from called Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Model. And during that process, really the thing that I started to think deeply about was here is a model that is fundamentally new in our ecosystem. The reason why this was new was it wasn't again trained to do anything in particular. But it was its premise was it could do anything and everything was like a stem cell if you were to take a biology analogy. And I got really interested in this idea that well, if we were to really think about what are the killer applications that this particular technology would enable, what would that be? Many of my colleagues were using this for a simple classification, simple generations. Interesting that these models can do that, but from an instruction perspective, not that interesting. We've known how to do that for many decades. And what we came down to was these models are actually trained on this very broad data from the web. Right? So these are human behavior data, it's social media, Wikipedia, all these kind of data. So if you poke at the right angle, then you could see human behavior that would just pop out. That's actually quite realistic. I've never seen that before. So that is really interesting. The exercise that we decided to do and this is something that we, this particular group of colleagues that I have myself, micro-burned steam, personally, who ended up becoming a micro-founder. Similarly, we set down and we played this game that we call the time machine game. Imagine we were to get on a time machine and fast forward ten years and look back. That would have been the single application that will have matter, that would be the most interesting and inspiring. And what we thought, well, what if we can just recreate the world that we live in? I mean, it's really hard to get more ambitious than that. Let's just create a world. And that's where we started. And initially we had this paper that was a precursor to the General Debations paper called social singular. Before you go further, was there like other candidates for the most ambitious thing in the time machine exercise? Exercise. Yeah. What could have been? What were the next? What was number three? Okay. If you remember. So there is a closed second that we were considering, which basically ended up becoming more of these automation tools, but especially the vision around really personalized agents. They would actually do things for you. And that's also happening. It's also happening. But it was sort of interesting for us, right? In that the reason why we decided to go with the idea of simulation one, I mean, I was a huge science, you know, science fiction nerd. And this idea of creating simulation, I was personally really just fascinated. I love the idea. It's really cool to see like a game time like this and just see these agents live in it. But at the same time, my bet was if you were to create a really amazing personal assistant out of this technology, what you actually need first is an amazing motor of your users. So for instance, I told a motor, hey, can you go buy me dinner for me and it orders how I am pizza and I do not like pineapples on my pizza, then it totally failed. The way for it to not make that mistake is only by having a deep understanding of why I am. And I gave a very simple and an example here, but you can imagine how this core understanding of people is instrumental. This is how, for instance, if we have our family closest friend, they have a good mental motor of who we are, that's the basis of our social connection. So our bet also was this technology around simulation, creating accurate representation of people are to proceed the more complex agents that would automate the world that we live in. So that was the bet. So for, but that was a very close second and I'm still very much fascinated by it. I think there's a lot of interesting work that's going around. My heartache actually here, though, is I don't think we've actually seen a true personal assistant that's actually useful in ways that actually meets the ambition of that particular line of work. I think there are early applications that are obviously interesting. And if you talk to even chat you pity nowadays or cloth, they obviously know a lot about us. So a lot of the generation it's doing, I do think it's a much more tailored, but I think the ambition is quite large in that field and I don't think we quite have all the right ingredients just yet. So like open claw, all these kinds of storage and say, what do you want to see from them that you're that they don't currently have they do think it's slowly getting there, but I do generally want them to have much deeper understanding of the person. Right now you look at the models, I mean open claw and what's it's basically leveraging is basically mark down file. And I think it's quite clever. Right. So if you look at the gender of the agent's paper, this actually was a same intuition that we had, where initially when we were creating the memory architecture for the gender of the agents and like this is like back in 2022. So we didn't really quite have the idea of even agent of architecture or the term agent. But intuition that we shared with some of the work that's coming out today was we initially thought, well, do we want to make the memory into, let's say, knowledge graph? Do we want to train a bespoke model, all these kind of things? And what we decided to do was no, no, no, just forget about all this. These language models are actually quite good at modeling text and understanding and reasoning about text. So just put everything in the mark down file where text while you're done. I thought that was quite interesting that we could do that. And there's a lot of strength in doing that. But also there is limitation. It's the way you retrieve and make sense of data that's extremely large. It takes a lot of work. So I think that technology is getting better. I also do, however, think there are certain things you just cannot shape just like prompting the model. So some to some degree, you do need to touch the parameters of the model itself. So there's these kind of work that I do think does need to happen. And obviously it is happening. The question is how far can we take it? How do we source data and how do you also create an ecosystem where the people are continuously feeding data to this model? So it's learning about game. What's the intuition between what you need to do in the model? My intuition behind that, actually, when do you train or even post train the model versus just prompt the model is it? If the model has to learn the underlying physics of the world that it's operating in. So it has to learn new social physics. The places where it doesn't have to train is it already has the physics. We trust the physics. It already has the base statistics, but it's just trying to react to an environment. Then I think you can just prompt your way into getting the actions out of it. I don't think the model has yet, at least the model that are out in the open has yet learned the complete mapping of social physics of humanity. This actually is one of the core thesis of similarly, right? And one of the core reason why that is the case is if you look at the data that the model was trained on, these models were trained on the web data and whatever was available on the web. And these are really interesting data sets, but they are fundamentally the self-exposed added to the data with some behavior data that's sprinkled around here and there. And it has yet to learn really deep behavioral nature of people, not just what people say they don't mind, but what they actually do in real life. And this is actually one of the sort of what I would consider to be the dark knowledge of humanity that we haven't quite captured. And it's these kinds of data that would also need to get factored into the model creation. You call it behavior foundation model. Yeah. There's a good one minor here, but outside of that what type of data do you need? What are you changing on the model level? How do you go about actually modeling, you know, doing a behavior foundation model? We think about data in three buckets. So one bucket is actually we need to be data, for instance, and it's quite interesting. A qualitative, rich qualitative data is interesting. It's not behavioral, but we would literally ask people, hey, tell me the story of your life. Yeah. Which is what we're doing here. Exactly. The question that you all asked at the beginning of this interview literally is the question we also ask. And obviously, you know, we ask our participants to go a little bit deeper and then how far I went. Maybe I can actually keep more of my life story in lieu of this. But the reason why that data is interesting is by learning about this very long tail information about people, you actually get a lot of texture around this model, like this person as a model. So even understanding their childhood memory, or even their trauma, their first love, these kind of things quite informative in ways that's really hard to predict. So that's one. Then there are sort of two tranches of what I would consider to be the behavioral data. So one behavior data actually is observational. So these might actually be like transaction data or these might be data that you can get by scripting the web. So you can imagine why these data would be these data sets would be interesting, right? Because they give you the base statistics of people's behavior. But then there is the last category of data that I personally think is perhaps the most important, which is the data that basically describes the cause of mechanism, the wise of people. And some of this is covered by the interview data, the qualitative because people talk about why they made certain decisions, but really where you get to see the most behavioral aspect of this actually is in randomized control trials like RCTs. Imagine you basically have the same setup, but you have a few different variables that you are trying to tweak. Can you actually get realistic human behavior out of it in ways where oh, imagine you had to make the imagine you had this particular option, imagine you're even trying to choose whether you're going to drink coffee or not. The day you drink coffee versus the day you didn't drink coffee, does your behavior change? That's a data set that describes the cause of mechanism. This actually is quite important in actually modeling people. The reason why this is important is often times when people come to us or not just to us, but the reason why people are interested in simulation actually isn't because they want to create the future. If you're trying to win against a stock market, predict the future is interesting, but most people, most decision makers, what they want to know is how can we shake the future? It doesn't really help you to hear that your sales is going to tank into quarters. They're just going to say, wow, that sucks. What they want to know is, well, what do we need to do now to avoid that future? That's cause of mechanism. This is also a very hard data to come by because the world is our ground truth, but it happens once. In a very controlled setup where everything is equal except for one variable, this kind of data set almost rarely happens. This is the reason why this data set is both hard to come by, but also quite important if you're trying to model human behavior. The behavior, I think, is the hardest data set to acquire. What is out there? What is possible? You're not going to know a lot of details about my life. I don't even have data for myself. I want to analyze my own health or habits, and I just don't log everything. How can you have that data? We actually run a lot of rent, rent, and control trials. People in the lab, they watch them sleep or what. We do actually care a lot about the consent process, so people know that we invite them to be a member of this community to share their data and also have their selves represented in different forms, but we bring a lot of people to the lab, or virtual lab, where we design experiments that would actually pose them real behavioral decisions. Often in this kind of experimental setup, what makes the difference between what is additional versus behavioral is if the stake in your decision is real, that's ultimately what makes a behavioral. In these kind of setups, we are inspired by our colleagues in social sciences, technology and so forth. When they run studies, what the techniques they utilize is, imagine there is an online store that you're inviting people to come by, and then whatever they purchase in this experiment, they actually get that item delivered, for instance. These are the kind of things that makes the stakes real, so we run a lot of these experiments. We also do partner with firms, and also right now, we also have customers who are quite excited to at least give us a glimpse of the kind of behaviors that their users are accepted, so that we can get a little bit deeper in their setting up how people behave in these different platforms. I think on the customer side, they have a lot of data about their users who have, but they have the action data, can you kind of walk us through an example of what does someone come to you for, what questions would they want to solve in the process of do you customize a model for them, do you have something off the shelf, what is that look like? Today, when people leverage our models, it's often to better understand the population of their interest. Usually, the start of their relationship, we basically come together and hear about what population they want us to model, so it might be that if you're a CPG company that's selling to all of the US, it might be fairly straightforward, you want to model the gem pop of the US, but at the same time, there is a vertical, or if there's a market that they're trying to go into, imagine how they want to better understand, let's say, people in their 20s and 30s living in California, that's a much more specific population. We hear about these populations and we go recruit these people with consent and with incentives, and we basically collect some of their data and create a model of these people. Then what our protocol allows you to do is basically query them, so it can take us input a filter that is a description of the population that you want to talk to, just like the one I just mentioned, and an environment. It can literally be a survey question, it can be behavior or experiments, it can be a habit testing, oftentimes the core use cases are things like concept testing to start with, but also people sometimes want to do focus group, or one of the fun use cases that we also serve is actually even modeling things like the earnings call for public companies. So these are the use cases that we often start with. Concept testing, is that an established term I've never heard of concept testing? Yeah, so it basically has to do with, let's say, different messaging, different products, different ideas. It's like a marketing exercise. Yeah. Okay, got it, got it. Politics. We do have a strategic partnership with Gallup, and of course, Gallup is deep into policy space and so forth. Right now, we have not worked deeply with politics, like that area just yet, however. I'm curious if there is demand, or if they really would have different needs that somehow fundamentally don't mix with your existing users or people. I think there's certainly demand. Yeah. But we are very much mindful of how this technology gets adopted, and the societal impact that we'll end up having with this technology. And I do see politics as an area where a company has to be particularly thoughtful about the way they operate and make impact. So this is where we also want to make sure that we form enough of car rail and perspective on how to leverage this technology before we go on to serve markets like the politics. Give people an example, one of my favorite shows is the West Wing, I don't know if people have watched. One of those key storylines is that the president has multiple sclerosis, but they haven't, they need to figure out how to disclose it. So they run a poll with a fake governor and ask people to respond on the poll, and they try to make decisions based on the results of that poll on like how well they'll receive like where, how shall we play this? And I'm like, well, you know, I think those kind of counterfactual things, I would actually use a simulation for that. this if I could trust it. I was sure. Yeah, in that show, how did it go? In that show, it basically was like kind of like a foregone conclusion there. They were like, we know it's bad. We just don't know how bad. And then the poking back, it was like, it's really bad. And then they just did it anyway. Part of it is it's a show, right? So you're, you're, you're, you're maximizing drama. How that could it be? Oh, it's horrible. And to some extent, I think that is part of the trick of the challenge or with being a customer of yours, which is that if I know it's, if I roughly know and can into it, what the effect is going to be, do I need you? What sensitivity of, of, effect, do I need in order to make a decision? Right? So for example, if I, my approval rating is 50% and I have this negative piece, news item comes out and it drops to 30. Yeah. If it drops to 20, if it drops to 40, do I care? No, it, I know it drops. It's negative. So when do I care about simulations? You do something that's clearly bad. That's not popular and people don't like you. Like, yeah, I mean, you don't need a solution. Yeah. Well, so there are a couple of things. One, actually, obviously, is, um, or use cases where like every day, for instance, developers, designers, policymakers, marketers, every single day, they create assets, they create new products and turns out it's actually, um, many of the decisions in hindsight is sort of obvious. Yes, of course, this is bad. But we still run those studies because understanding the magnitude and understanding how acute something is is actually quite difficult. Even if we feel like, of course, like this makes sense. I mean, this is the reason why we make so many mistakes. Like every time somebody goes online and say something that has huge backlash, you look at that and like, what an idiot. However, it's tough. That's one. There's also another aspect here, which is, again, this is a reason why simulation is actually different from prediction. In simulation, in the idea of case scenario, so what simulation is trying to show is it's trying to show each step of the way or each step that we need to take to get to a certain outcome. Right. So in the most advanced simulations, sometimes the next step that we're suggesting might actually be quite counterintuitive. The analogy that I sometimes give, and I grounded in a more realistic example, but you know, as I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of science fiction. And I don't know how many of the audience members have read, like things like the foundation series. We've mentioned psycho history number, number of times. Okay, fantastic. So I might actually be talking to the right crew. If you read foundation series, literally the first act is, there's a group of scientists who have found out that, oh, our galactic empire is going to collapse. And we're going to have 30,000 years of unrest. And they basically run psycho history, the simulator that tries to teach them, okay, how can we keep this unrest 2,000 years? And they plan this out. And the first step of the plan is to get the scientists to say, okay, this is coming, exiled into this random place in this galaxy. Terminus. Exactly. And that's so counterintuitive, like what a strange move that you literally sent the group of scientists who was raising voice around this potential collapse of galactic empire into nowhere. How is that the right first move? What turns out in this particular simulation, that actually was the move. It's these kind of things, right? And the reason why this kind of reasoning is possible is because you're showing the step function or each step that results in a particular outcome. So really what simulation allows you to do in its highest form is you give it not a problem or question, like what would people answer to the survey? That's not what we do. What we tell it is here is a goal that we have. In the context of foundation, we want to keep the unrest 2,000 years. What is the path that we need to take now to get to that particular feature? That's what simulation allows you to do. Now translating that into real market, imagine you're an automobile company and you're about to release an EV. And you're trying to understand, well, how do we market EV to make sure that our stock price goes up? But what if the answer comes down that, well, you can market your EV in a XYZ way, but that might change people's perception around the cars that's not EV and actually make your overall sales to go down. Not very intuitive, especially all you're trying to optimize is EV sale and that's the only thing you're tracking. Then that might actually result in a completely wrong solution or at least different solution than what you would have expected, whether it's right or wrong. Yeah. That's the power of simulation. For listeners, we covered a similar topic with Michael Park and from Shopify, where they are working with SIMGIM. I don't know if you ever talked to you about it. It's very similar. The goal is increased conversion, but then the journey is very unusual. Journey is unusual. Yeah. He's actually trying to look for interventions on a shopping trajectory, which is similar to what you say. It's not about the attitude and always your word for it. It's about behavior. It's about being, and that's exactly the difference. It's not about the near term direction, but it's more about how do you affect multiple turns of interactions. You had a good quote at the start about this as well. It's not about people wanting to know the outcome. It's about how they can change it, change the way to get there, something like that. But I want to take it back to, how do we know this is grounded? Yes. How do you test that simulations come through? Basically, if I was to do the same thing that you described with, say, your favorite LM, Opus, GPT-56, have some agent to map out these things. How different are the answers we would get? If I give it the same goal, the same objective, make a decent system, you're saying that you need to change the model weight. You have your own solution to this, but how far off are we? How do you check if it's grounded? You have some interesting stuff on your site that actually points to how you run really files, but if you could take us through that side. I think that's one of the big concerns that people have. They're like LM's hallucinate. You're just hallucinating layer after layer, right? The way we do this, and this is actually the paper that we worked on after the Generative Agents paper that really became the, at least for a similarly, and also the field of simulation and synthetic panels really became the foundation. This is the paper. The paper is called Generative Agents simulations of thousand people. Here's what we've done. For this paper, we actually brought thousand people that's representatively simple from the US to a virtual app. What we basically have done was we spent two hours collecting fairly wide ranging data. In this particular study, we focused a lot on this interview data that was, whose script was taken from this project called American Voices Project, and then we would also pair that with a lot of behavior data and so forth whatever we can collect within two hours. Then we would actually send these people away for a couple of weeks. During that time, I would use this data to create their digital twins. I would bring the humans participants back after two weeks and have them complete a battery of surveys, experiments, behavior studies. So we actually have the list here, which basically includes the things like the behavior economic games. We would run literally like the five personality tests, general source of survey. We would also go ahead and run the randomness control trials that were published on PNAS. And we would have their digital twins predict how the source individuals would have acted in these studies and surveys. And this is where we basically could replicate people's behaviors and attitudes 85% as accurately as people would replicate their own. So that actually was the first really paper that gave this validated results that we can actually model individuals in an accurate way. And what we ended up finding now, of course, in AI space. So this paper came out at the end of 2024 AI space a year and a half, two years, that's a lifetime. We are just for listeners who are not seeing the YouTube. I just want to say like the headline figure is 85% accuracy, which is a big improvement over all the other methods that you showed. But the part that was actually particularly striking to us, especially as we improved this technology even further, was the gender of the agent's model, gender of the AI model is like change at PT cloud that's coming out. It does give you the right foundation. However, what they do not consider is the true, additional and behavioral aspect of people, especially in the population that you care about. So what these models are really, really good at today is they're trying to basically become the super rational objective machines. So you go get their data from places like my course scale, you talk to professional programmers, scientists to create model that's amazing at reasoning. That's what they do. Similarly, actually, it doesn't care about any of this. The models that we're talking about here, what we're trying to create are models that are as dumb as I am. So if I make some mistakes, the model has to make the same kind of mistake. Oh, that's very hard. That's very hard. You're solving more of experiments. That's exactly. And this is actually completely different kind of data and training objective. This is also where we actually see quite a bit of discrepancy in the performance and human behavior prediction between the frontier models and similes model and the models that are created and getting created in the space. Whereas in some cases, the model performance of frontier models go all the way down to 20%, 30%. especially if you go into that more niche population on topics that our customers would actually care about. On more gem pop, it might be around 50% to 60%, so it's not very robust. Like you wouldn't want to make your decision of off of these kind of more and these kind of findings. If you can bring that up to 85%, that is ultimately what people end up getting very excited about. Yeah. Do we want to keep going on the paper routes? Yeah, for sure. So the last one was sort of an interesting one. So this paper was the follow up paper that we had to the 1000 agents paper, where basically the idea was now can we augment the models even further and actually post-trained the model based on a lot of range control trials. So this was an interesting one. The data is always the most interesting part of modeling in many ways. The data that we got here was there's this platform called Open Science Foundation. So some, the audience might be familiar with this and there has been, especially in the social sciences over the past five years or so, there has been this concern around replicability of studies. So it was a bit of a crisis, the scientists acknowledged where we rerun the study and we don't actually see the same findings. It's tough. And the reason why it's dealt with those often the case was there's basically the survival bias where the papers that get published often need to maintain what we call the P value of less than 0.05 in the experiments that we ran. That basically suggests that only there's only five percent chance that the results that we saw is false positive. But the tricky part was all the papers that were not published and there's still five percent chance that whatever we publish is actually totally just randomly generated like there's five percent chance that hey, this effect is not real, but it just happened to be real because of the sampling bias. So because of that, what scientists started to do was they started to pre-register their studies. So before running an experiment, they would go to this platform and say here is the data, here is the population that we're collecting and here's the hypotheses. And they would just say here is our hypothesis, like this is what we believe. And you cannot retroactively change those hypotheses. This is what actually gives us more of scientific statistical confidence that whatever effect you ended up seeing is actually true. So that ended up creating this really interesting platform where there's one platform that has now contains tens of thousands of real-world experiments and hypotheses. And a lot of these are actually really high quality, like professionally designed behavior studies and randomized control trials. So we actually got the data and the studies from this platform and basically used that to make a point. And obviously this particular amount of water is not something that we're serving commercially because this obviously was a part of the open science. But this particular data set may help us make a point that by collecting a lot of these randomized control trials and that are really well designed, we can make significant improvement in models capability to predict human behaviors. So that's what this paper was about. Is this stuff done on an individual level? Like, do I need to tune the model per individual, per company is our foundation model changes and then some slight post training, anything you can share there? So this particular model actually was trained, the data we actually had at the level of individuals, but this particular model actually was trained we experimented with both. And this is actually what we end up doing as similarly to. We always train two distinct model. One is what we call the population level model. The other is what we call the individual level model. And both actually take very similar input, which is the description of a self-population or individual and a stimuli. In this particular work, we've done the same here, the results that we are reporting are much more geared towards individuals because we do actually think that is harder task in many ways, but that's what we have done. You've seen anything on the questions that humans can solve, that models can't solve. So currently, you know, I live five minutes walk away from a car wash. It's a 10 minute drive, should I walk her drive? The model will say, "Oh, walk to the car wash." You know, you don't have your car. Is anything like this a problem in simulation? You would assume like very simple for human to think about, but if the model is saying you should walk to the car wash, you know, anything here? It's less what can we solve, but I think it's more about what biases or mistakes do people make than models miss. Like, for instance, imagine that you are, you know, like when I was still a Stanford, I lived in Palo Alto, so it's about, I would say, 40 minute walk from the campus. You ask the model, "Okay, let's go home." What can I do? It would likely call a nuper or, you know, give me, you know, the bus time. But for the longest time, I actually really liked walking back. And the reason why I wanted to do that was now for efficiency. It actually really helped me think. And I like to walk for, you know, half an hour or 40 minutes or so a day, where I just get to, you know, just think about ideas, researches, get lost in my thoughts. That's very human activity. Unless the model has seen that and actually understands the importance of that activity, it would actually miss these kind of features. So that actually I think is fundamentally what we're trying to model. Like, what is fundamentally human? My not be the most efficient thing to do, my not be the right thing to do, but things that make us who we are. I'm curious if there are some data sets that you really want that would materially help you. One version of this may be interesting, which is more valuable to you to acquire the data set. All of LinkedIn, all of Twitter, all of Facebook. You know, to be honest, it's a little hard to rank in part because, you know, there's, there's this product saying where no feedback is wrong because it teaches you something about your users, doesn't matter what kind of feedback. I think it's a little bit like that. So just whatever is bigger. Yeah. What I think is a different domain. It was what about all of Amazon data? Shopping data, right? Shopping data. So Amazon data is interesting in that it's very much behavioral. Although like what people do on social media, you could sort of squint and say that is also behavioral, but the transaction data is always interesting. It is also most commonly available, however, if we were to look at purely social media, if you really, you know, if I were, you know, if I had to really pick, Facebook likely is interesting because I actually do think it is most sort of a default version of people because you go to LinkedIn. It's very much professional environment. So people put up their, you know, they have their cards up, right? And that's the less interesting because that is true human attitude and behavior, but it is not your base state. You go to Twitter. Twitter, people have their own crazy personas, or depending on who you are. My Twitter profile and, you know, persona is very much, initially it was very much academic. I'm here to share my studies. Now I share things that's related personally, but Facebook is one of those more private space where people just connect with their friends. And that way I actually do think it shows you a little bit more about who that person is. So if I had to pick, I likely pick Facebook. Yeah. And you are interested in like the whole person and their background and philosophy. I guess is it too clinical or too machine learning oriented to just say this is just ways to inject variance and biases? The bar question, I guess, is like, is this any better than a randomized like combinatorial explosion version? So we have a link to the 10 cent billion persona paper where they basically did not do any of the groundwork that you are doing. They just sort of did like a cross matrix. So here's all the professions in the world. Here's all the possible backgrounds in the world. Do a dot product across all of them. And that's it. That's your prompt for a billion people. Yeah. This will do something. If it will do what you do, but it gets you some way, some percent of the way there. So this actually was an interesting paper. Like what I admired about this paper when it came out was the scale. And obviously you do gradually want to be able to simulate really large societies and interactions. So the scale is definitely admirable. It is relying heavily on the known statistics that went into training the model. So to the extent that you believe that statistics is correct, this is actually not a bad way to go about this. But the thesis here and this is something that we also have seen in the market. Like if this works, then we actually have solved simulation. Right. Because I survey like, okay, 5% of the US population is in construction. Yeah. The other 5% is in medicine, whatever. Right. And then you just keep going on the list and then you do the other side. 5% has like, you know, the big 5% personality of like neurotic whatever. That's it. That's it. So if you believe that the underlying data set and the platform they were leveraging has all the right statistics, then this actually will have solved it. You're at that point merely retrieving the knowledge that is already embedded the model in the model parameters. That's not unfortunately what we see where there is such detailed and also niche knowledge about people that if you just take one example, it might feel very mundane but it's actually quite rich when you put together that you actually do need to do a lot of bespoke data collection to better understand people. And this is also you know, I think what makes this particular job fun, which is you want to deeply understand people and the process of deeply understanding that actually requires a lot of attention to the details and you do need to pay attention attention to and pay respect to the daily likes that people lead. I want to talk about scaling simulation. So what can we stimulate? What can we simulate? And how does scaling affect this? So how big are the models? What if we go from, you know, it'd be like a couple hundred million, like a hundred billion parameters trillion. Do we get scaling? Any interesting emergence, like at a certain scale, at a certain amount of training, you uncover anything unusual and any learnings from that? What we are seeing is, similarly, so we do post-trained our own model. The thing that we're actually seeing is the early glimpse of scaling law in simulations. The more data about humans and more compute you ingest, you actually start to get predictive and predictable gains of the model performance in simulating and predicting people. We need a scaling locker. You know, it's scaling law whenever you find it, it's a beautiful thing. And we're starting to see the glimpse of it, which is quite exciting. But if you talk about the ambition of simulation as a whole, it's not merely about building a model. It's about building a model, then creating the agents that become the individuals in a much larger ecosystem. So basically creating this multi agent simulation down the line, you want these multi agent simulation to also live in a very rich environment, right? What we are really trying to get to at that point is, can we actually create, let's do a time machine game again, five years, ten years into the future, can we create a simulation of 8 billion people living on Earth? I think that's quite interesting. And there really is division. And once you get to that kind of state, the kind of questions that you can help answer for the society also start to change from my perspective. The answers are fundamentally about the emergence of the emerging behavior of society and large groups of people. So, for instance, the kind of questions that I get excited by, and maybe this is a still like a bit, I have my academic side of me. And for me, it's questions like, can we help solve climate change? If you look at climate change as a problem space, this is what we, like sort of scientists would often call the wicked problems. Problem where you have many actors with competing incentives for trying to make a very complex decision, a coordinating, a coordination decision, a very difficult to really solve in real life, which is also the reason why we can solve it, can simulation help us solve that? Another one is, can we actually understand the signals for collapsing democracy? Or can we understand or can we uncover the origin story of the monetary system? These are societal questions that we never really had a good way of answering. If we can create simulations of our society, you have to believe that these are the kind of problems that we can solve. So that's really the ambition of this field. And I also think, yes, I mean, I think there's a Nobel Prize to be won there, which wouldn't be surprising. And I think there's an amazing societal impact that we can have to help people make better decisions. Nobel Prize in economics? In economics. All right, see, see. We're rooting for you to write that paper. One of these days, but one of the scholars that I was deeply inspired by when I was coming into the space of simulation actually is the scholar named Thomas Schelling. Schelling point. So the canonical example of the work that he's done was he was one of the creators of agent-based modeling. So this was like in the 1970s and 80s. It's very early days, but this was truly one of the first examples of simulations. And one of the canonical models from that time, and of course, many of these simulations are trying to tackle the societal problems that's most relevant for their era. I was called the model of segregation. So racial segregation was a big topic that we carried about. And what they've done was they actually created this great world where they had red dots and blue dots. And these dots were back in the day like they were the agents. And they had a simple rule that governed their behavior. If certain percentage of your neighbors are of the front color and if that goes above certain threshold, then you move to a new location at random. One of the striking findings of this paper, or this agent-based model, was for the longest time, people thought the segregation within society was caused by explicit and overt racism. But if you look at this model, people's preference towards living with people of the same color, that preference can be very minute. But the very small difference actually causes the society to segregate completely over time. This was very counterintuitive for a lot of people. And this particular work ended up informing housing policies, mixed income housing, for instance, God will inspire by this kind of work. And Thomas Schilling ends up winning the Nobel Prize for having laid the groundwork for very early versions of simulations. The opportunity that I do say here in the more scientific terms is agent-based models for the longest had impact in the 1980s, 90s to some extent early 2000s. But it has now sort of gotten forgotten by the community a little bit because, as you can imagine, red dots and blue dots is not really a rich description of people. But with the emergence of things like gender, and particular gender to agents, we do have an opportunity to create these kind of agent-based models that are high fidelity enough to help us make really complex decisions. And that's the opportunity that I see if that truly works, then yes, and that is the kind of work that will result in a Nobel Prize. Yeah, for what it's worth, and I grew up in Singapore, 80% of Singapore is in public housing. And the public housing has enforced racial quotas for exactly that reason, which has been interesting. Okay, so we talk about Schilling, we talk about all these, the sort of agent-possible applications. I'm scared about the cost. If you, even, let's just keep it to the US, not a billion people. But how much does it cost to model so many hundreds of millions of people? Oftentimes, today, obviously, we don't start at that scale, the stage of the industry and simulation and technology, but we can actually get to our users' extremely rich and meaningful insights, even by modeling thousands, tens of thousands of people. And today, what we do is, every week, we are collecting data on the scale of tens of thousands of people's data, and we actually have panel partnerships that get us to tens of millions of people globally. So that's what we do today. And just as a side note, once you've collected one person for one study, can you reuse that same person for all the subsequent studies? That's exactly right. The beauty of this model and these agents is the fact that they are domain agnostic. Yeah. What you're really trying to understand is what is the fundamental nature of these people, what's their social physics. And obviously, there are a lot of people that does change over time, even things like how many times have you gone to CBS the past week, obviously, that will change. But there's so many traits about people that are also known to never change. Your risk tolerance doesn't really change over time. It's very consistent. So it's these kinds of things that we're trying to learn. But the scale we are operating is right now hundreds or tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. And in many of the core use cases that we are deployed in, and this is more than enough population to cover those. Really, at that point, what you care about is less than a number of people. But more, do you have the right self-population of interest covered? And this is also the reason why people want a larger sample. It's not because they actually want stronger statistical guarantees. It's more that can they actually fizzle down to any population of their interest. However, you can also imagine, in 10 years, if we truly believe that the compute is going to scale, that will have much more availability for compute. And our ambition for assimilation is also going to scale accordingly. And there's definitely a reason for us to create an entire data center worth of simulations. Where my hunch here is, I do think in the next some number of years, we will start creating simulations that will actually cost as much as training a foundation model. But perhaps it's going to be so valuable to the society that it would be a no-brainer. I mean, right now, even today, like we are training a bunch of new foundation model just so we can say we trained one and we spend tens of millions. But if we can create a simulation at the level of society, there would actually solve climate change. I'll run that today. I'll raise the money right now just to run that. Easy. I guess the follow-up question is, does it also compound if you let the simulations talk to each other, or do they already do that today? They don't, right? That's why I understand. It depends on what kind of simulation you're trying to run. In the multi-agent simulation setup, the agents do talk to each other. Right. Right. Right. But a lot of times, for example, in e-commerce, you're just by yourself. So there's no point talking. Which is way too bad. But each one of those levels, right? Like you decide what you will buy based on what other people around you buy and talk about, right? It depends. Again, I'm coming at this from a costment of you. I'm like, oh my god. I think. If there is some combinatorial thing of thousands of people talking to thousands of people, then that one million excess might cost. I have a very different view as the costment aside. Like running these studies. in reality is actually a lot more expensive, right? Running any study like this is, you gotta have people do it, you gotta sign people up. It's very expensive and sometimes like, not feasible to actually run the study, but the outcome or the decisions you make are very expensive on them, right? So spend X million on something that, you know, the overall process cost 100 million might as well, right? There's a lot of value to be had there, it's a small cost, but I'm excited on the cost side actually. To some extent, you know, and obviously, when you deploy technology, you often want to deploy in a way where you can replace existing budget or you can basically make things more efficient and that is the best way to deploy. However, the way you capture the long-term value of the technology actually is making an argument that no, it's actually the upside that by making this better decision using simulation, you have saved yourself or made yourself hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. And that's a case to be made. - Random tangent question. So if you're doing a lot of inference, a lot of model multi-agent stuff, are you at the point where it makes sense to, you know, train a model that's, you know, very sparse, you're expecting to do multi-million dollar runs? Are you thinking about this in model architecture standpoint or inference efficiency or, you know, you're still at the research phase of, it works, it works, we're not super there yet. - Efficiency, we actually do think quite a bit about. I mean, this is technology that is deployed now in some of the largest enterprise companies in the world. And we do process significant number of queries that are trying to, you know, simulate the populations in the world. So efficiency is a consistent thing. Obviously, we don't want to over optimize too early. So I wouldn't say like this is the higher a bit right now, but this is definitely something that we think pretty carefully about. - Yeah, are there other case studies? So you talked about CVS, talk about Gallaud, deploy a well-front. - Well-front is an interesting one because one of the things that we're trying to do, they were one of the first customers that wanted to actually do product testing. It goes beyond just asking people what they think about, let's say behavior experiments and so forth. So there, really what we had to do was reason about multi-modal input. So images, but also you can also imagine these agents traversing through Figma mockups or websites. So some of the things that our agents can also do is you can be given a domain or a website URL and actually go use it for a while. It's these kind of things. And both for instance, was one of the first customers that was very excited about this possibility? - Well, have people been asking like, is there any demand that we have not covered? Like UI testing, right? I want to try a new, I want to ship a new feature, test the UI. Similarly, happy people will do it. Any interesting things that you're seeing demand for. Today, a lot of the demand does come from, basically like the places where people have historically used human panels, we can basically now replace with agents and synthetic populations. And this is obviously not replacing human panel. In many ways, the simulation, the similes building is grounded. So the way that I think about this is we are trying to represent humanity at scale. And in that way, the use cases are what we would expect, but it's the scale of deployment that surprises me. Turns out there's so many decisions that people make every day in these organizations, groups, and we want to be able to say we listen to people, we have consulted our users, but in reality, that is really the case. Because getting to people and actually asking them many questions, it's difficult. It's both costly, time consuming, but most importantly, people are just not available. If I had to answer thousand survey questions for this one particular vendor, even if I wanted to do that, I would never do it. And that's very much the case. What simulation can do is ensure that the voices of people is always represented in rooms where the decisions for them is made. So all the stakeholders of this particular product range, ideally, they're consulted. That's what this technology really is trying to enable. - In my mind, that means it's skews towards more consumer focus, right? Like anything with a wide enough customer base where you do benefit from the diversity that you represent. What are some rough statistics? Just for people who are not familiar with this market in general, what's the market size? I'm sure you have some rough numbers. Obviously, market size is like a big question, but how much do people spend? - So market research is a hundred billion dollar industry. - Yeah. - But the thing about simulation is, simulation is not a tool for market research. Simulation is a tool for human decision making. So the question around what is a 10 here is actually quite tricky, right? Because it's easy to say, well, market research 10 is roughly a hundred million or a hundred billion. So is that a 10? And not really, right? Because in many ways, you're trying to inform all human decision making. You're trying to basically inform every decisions that are made about human for humans. What is a 10 for that? It's really unclear. And I'll be honest. I have a scientific background. I have a research background. So I didn't come into the field to actually calculate, "Oh, what is a 10 for human decision making?" But I just had to assume, well, if we can inform every decision that is made about human for human, that has to be big. - Something valuable. - Exactly. - I mean, some extent, you are a unicorn founder now and you have to care as a CEO. (laughing) But like, I do think like, yeah, we go into these boardrooms with people that you're quoting millions of dollars of contracts for like, you have to say, well, here's what you spend on humans. And here's what we say to you. And it's 85% similar. - And so, the value case is something that we care deeply about. Like, what is the value that we actually provide to the users and the decision makers? But this is also where, like, as a founder, I think valuation only tells one very superficial aspect of the story. And I try not to think too much about valuation in general. Because that's not what also motivates a team or something that doesn't, you know. I'm, again, the interesting thing about researchers is we are happy living in academia, getting paid next to, I mean, we get paid, okay, I mean, we don't get paid that much. I mean, it's a researcher in academia, but it's the impact and it's the, it's the value that we can provide to the individuals and the society that really drives us. And in that way, ultimately what drives us is the impact. Does the simulation we provide have a real impact in people's decision making in ways that progresses our society for? If the answer is yes, then yes. I mean, that has to be a great business. And we see that in numbers and we do care deeply about that upside story, but that's the higher a bit. - Do you have any timeline prediction? So we talked about scaling laws of simulations. You brought up, okay, maybe one day we can simulate how to solve climate change. Where are we now? If that's not the end state, what is an end state? What does progress look like, you know? So what I sometimes tell people, is simulation is in the street, it fears a lot like where do you think is 0.5, 0.4 was for the AGI saga, which basically is we have now technology that is powerful enough to do real damage on the verticals that we are tackling. At the same time, there's a lot of progress that is yet to come. And that's I think where this is. So the way I see it, I do think there will continue to be breakthroughs both in data, obviously in I agree with them. And there will be much more aggressive scaling that will also happen over the next few years. But I think that's roughly sort of where we are. - I think that was about the rough set of topics. Anything else that we should have asked you, you wish people asked you more about, about simile? - You know, I think the, what's for me, what's actually quite fascinating about simulation, it is very impactful technology, but actually it's also very interesting technology, both in terms of what it means for human society, our philosophy, and the way I sometimes interpret simulation is so going back to my background. I actually, as I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a painter. It was a professional pursuit, and I actually did work painting for figures. So I got my training originally in sort of the realism studios, and that's what I spend a lot of my years doing. Simulation is a lot like painting, right? The best paintings teach you something deep about the subject that you are trying to represent. And it is always not a perfect representation, it's no painting is perfect. There's always some small differences and discrepancy, but what it does is it tries to highlight the thing that matters the most about the subject. - Hmm, the essential essence. - He's brought up some of your work. - Just nice to put it up. - Yeah, so these are some of the work sets, so this is actually from my personal website that I maintain when, still have a researcher. I think a lot of people will say like you know like Picasso like anything more postmodern is like very much focused on the essence. Yes. Right. Yeah but I don't know if any one of these invokes something that you like to tell the story of. No it's one of those things where you know each of these paintings, drawings, whatever maybe it is trying to surface something about the subject that you feel deeply about onto the surface. You know when I was a painter and artist the topic that I cared really deeply about actually was the more mundane aspect of human lives. This actually shows up in some of the some of the work that I've done and where I did this entire study of a rural town where I basically went around and took photos of people for not really doing anything special but just living their everyday lives. I thought that was the most interesting thing. I'm somebody who has this perspective where you know the world is oriented around this fractal shape and you have to choice to understand the fractal shape. You either go outward and try to explore as much as you can to understand the broader shape of the fractal or you look inward because you know the outward resembles the inward shapes and understanding the mundane aspect of it was very much that. Simulation has a lot of this right. You're trying to understand even the most mundane aspect of people when put together teach you something really deep about that individual and the society. So I think that's what's interesting about simulation sort of the way the same way that AGI helped us better understand or really think critically about humanity and human intelligence. Simulation is really an exercise of understanding more about human society and our collective lives. So that I find to be a particularly interesting. Yeah. Now you're reminding me that some of the best biographers, documentaries and even photographers, they're taking a photo of you. But before I take a photo of you, I must spend, I must follow you for a week just to understand you, you know, which some artists do. Part of your work, there's a very famous book called Working. I don't know if you've been referred to it before. Yeah. It's very very famous like to the point of having a Wikipedia page about this kind of like really in-depth understanding and interview of people as they about their lives, which seems mundane, but it's told in a very compelling way. Yeah, 1970s as well. Okay. It was an amazing decade. Actually, before closing question, you said that you started Simulation with your 10-year question, right? If we do that now, 10 years down, what can we simulate? What would you simulate if like if you've made significant process? Are there any questions outside of the ones that we brought up and anything that you think is most important, anything that you would go vision 10 years out? In many ways, as I imagine, I am somebody who's very much impact-driven. So what would actually inspire me is I would want to ask 10 years later, what would actually be the most important societal question that we, as a society, have to ask? I would love to tackle that. Like, for instance, do we need UBI? That could be an interesting one. Oh, has anyone done that? Well, I mean, you know, we're thinking about it. I can get access. So just openly, I just, this is like just trivia now. Like openly, I, or I think Sam Altman actually funded a study on this in Africa and the answer was no. The answer was no. But what was it something about the implementation? Yeah, I know. It was a good issue. But this is a thing. See, when Sam. Fun in New Zealand? Fun in New Zealand. Fun in this particular. He's spent $14 million only for a bit. But this is the thing. This is the reason why you want to run simulation. You spend five years, $40 million on this one study and have one finding. But if you can run simulation many, many times, instantly, then that's the value. I feel like that one could, you could have done in a simulation. Like, if you can do the housing study, you can do the UBI one. Like, they don't mean come on. I think sometimes people will spend the money because they want to verify what you think, right? Like, sometimes you just want to. Is it actually, is it actually right? Like, you got tested. Okay, closing question. What are the chances we are in a simulation right now? It's a fun question. And I started at some point. I just answered, yeah, we're definitely in a simulation. But what I do feel, however, is whether we are in a simulation or not, that, I don't think that makes our experience any less real. And I think that's fundamentally like what I believe in. Maybe we live in a simulation, maybe not. But it's for us, yeah. For me, I don't really care. Yeah, unless you die and you wake up in, like, the level higher. That would be interesting. I feel like you wouldn't care, you know, once you die, then you find out. I worry about the one I die. Yeah. I think the other thing that I'm okay, so I like the mathematical answer to this, which is like the sheer number of possibilities that you are in a simulation, far away the sheer number of possibilities that you're not, except for the simplest answer, which is it is computationally very expensive to have you be a simulation. Okay, great. You've been very generous of your time. Congrats on your success. You just after your small, little paper had no idea that you could build like such an enormous company. And then now you're like, well, it's a hundred billion dollar market. But that's just where we're starting. So this is very exciting. A hundred billion dollar market was not the time. That was only a part. Exactly. If you are thinking too small. Well, I do believe that I made you my final note here might be. Again, I love science fiction. You look at any advanced civilization in science fiction. There's two twin pillar technology. One's AGI in some form. And the other is simulation. So I think the market's pretty big here. Tell us about the company has just raised a lot. You're half a research lab, half a company. You guess you're hiring rebased. Yeah. So we're based in Mission Rock. So not too far away from where we are right now. So we're in SF. But we are also by coastal. So we have our team. I would say our headquarters in SF. And we have a lot of our technical talent in SF. And we do have a smaller office that just opened up actually in New York. We are as a company. An interesting one in that today, obviously, there are AI new labs and then there are AI product companies. Similarly, truly is both. So this is a company that was founded by four co-founders. Myself, Michael Bernstein, Presley Young, Laney Yellen. Michael, Presley and I are all researchers. So of course, Michael was one of the co-authors of the ImageNet. Kicks are the AI revolution back in 2013. Has been instrumental in humans in their AI. Presley coined the term foundation model. And obviously it's like one of the the grades of the AI researchers today. And Laney is my business kind of part where she learned some of the fastest growing AI native companies from their C to AMB. But we have this DNA at the company where the vision of the technology that we're creating is continuously developing that we are getting people who were basically made lab mates. We are right now about 60 or so people, 15% almost 20% of the company population actually are just my lab mates. And we're it's actually quite fun because many of them then had gone on to open AI, Google Gemini and these places. And so it's been a few years since we really got together and had a chance to work together. But now they're coming back and really building out this vision that I find to be quite exciting and that excitement is shared. So there is that motion at Simling where we are group of researchers trying to do something that no one is working on that we find to be the most impactful potentially. But at the same time this is again technology that can make impact today. So we have an amazing group of engineers, product people and designers who are sitting here with us basically trying to imagine what does it look like to help people understand what simulation can do and make real world decisions with this. Having both and then deploying it to some of the largest customers in the world today, it feels quite unique. Yeah, it's very compelling. One part of it was this is the call to action. Who are you hiring? You've done part of it, which is you've got a very talented group. Who are you hiring? What roles? So honestly at this point we are hiring a very small section. We are always excited to bring on amazing research talent. So if you're interested in working with, you know, our lab mates, we are always, we're coming up amazing researchers. But also we hire amazing engineers and some of whom I like I respect the most. Many of them actually come from places where we have personal connections with so many of the members are from Thickema, Notion, RV and so forth. But also more broadly from the companies that we as a team have really admired. So engineers both on the product side, in fresh side, we're all looking for those hires. Well, lots of people. I think you made a really good case. So thanks and we'll see you in this simulation. Amazing. See you all there.