Interview, Fireside Chat
Simulating Humans at Scale: Simile's Joon Sung Park
- The company intends to build the first simulation of human society to enable societal guidance and social platform design, moving beyond costly field tests to avoid negative emotional propagation.
- Current paradigms may have plateaued in simulating human behavior diversity, with a predicted divergence between model size and the ability to predict human behavior due to inherent human irrationality.
- Validation of simulation accuracy is planned, building on a prior demonstration of 85% behavioral prediction accuracy in a 1,000-person U.S. population simulation before platform release.
- A theoretical North Star metric for quantitative decision-making is set at a Total Variation Distance (TVD) of less than 0.15, with confidence intervals and bootstrap resampling used for divergent scenarios.
- Customers are expected to rapidly shift from testing 5 to 10 ideas to instantly testing 1,000 different ideas across 1,000 different subpopulations, including product testing with a 10-minute temporal dimension.
- Routine requests will include multi-agent simulations of earnings calls, second-order impacts on entire product lines, and policy change implications over a five to ten-year horizon.
- Experiments will scale to unbounded user populations, bypassing platform limits like Facebook, with potential future simulations costing $100 million and lasting many months to solve fundamental societal questions.
- Models will be developed to focus on the diversity of values, preferences, and tastes to act as the "GPU of the intelligence unit," addressing the limitations of relying solely on rational frontier models.
- Predictions suggest the field of economics could be solved by simulation, with future applications extending to grand societal mysteries such as the origin of the monetary system and signals of democracy collapse.
- Conviction to build simulations is expected to strengthen over the years as research deepens, with a belief that innovation will eventually create a simulator akin to the discernment of human society.