The reputation of public opinion polls is not in a good place right now—or at least it wasn’t right before the 2024 election, and it’s hard to imagine the situation has improved much. A new company recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal is asking the bold question, hey, what if we just replaced all that with AI?
It’s called Simile, and it was just awarded $100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, the Journal says.
According to its website, Simile claims to be “developing a foundation model that predicts human behavior in any situation, at any scale.”
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Joon Park, told the Journal how this works in a little more detail. Apparently AI agents are trained on chat-style interviews with actual people, at which point the agents become “digital twins” or “digital clones” of their human counterparts. Actual data from people’s behaviors and consumer habits are added to make sure the clones are accurate. Then, market insights can then be derived—ostensibly at least—by having market researchers talk to or poll those “clones.”
Simile customers are allowed to, as the Journal puts it, “ask infinite questions of their AI people.”
This AI people idea may sound a little familiar.
There is a famous simulation of consumerism—actually intended to be a parody of consumerism, its creator would later explain to the New Yorker. It’s called the Sims, and it’s a video game that simulates quotidian reality.
While the Sims is not mentioned in the Journal’s story about Simile, it’s no secret that Simile took inspiration from it. A research paper from 2023, co-authored by Park, is about an effort to simulate human behavior. “We instantiate 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 says.
The agents in the paper have overarching desires, and interact with one another without being on rails. The paper provides the following sample conversation that occurs at a grocery store inside the simulation:
Sam: Hey Tom, how’s it going?
Tom: Good, thanks. What’s up?
Sam: Well, I wanted to talk to you about something. I’m actually running for mayor in the upcoming local election.
Tom: Really? That’s great news! Why are you running?
Sam: I’ve been involved in local politics for years now, and I really feel like I can make a difference in our community. 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“—has been interacting with Simile’s simulated people according to the Journal, and says the tool is “a really big unlock for us,” and that, “It’s not like I have to stop with how many questions I asked. There’s no fatigue.”
For instance, in the Journal’s telling, Narasimhan has been quizzing simulated people about pet medicine, “finding that people don’t consider giving their pets medication a chore.” Huge if true.
Nonetheless, apparently, CVS is about to scale up its “roster” to one hundred thousand simulated people, and query them on “store layouts and new product designs.”
Simile also has a partnership with Gallup—designed to simulate the experience of asking a policy question to a large group. On its website, there’s a sample of what this is supposed to look like once it works: essentially a chatbot prompting window with the words “What should I ask the group?” in gray font over the text entry field. “Model decisions against real-world sentiment — transparent, replicable, and empirically validated,” the page offers.
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