A portrait of eight billion people

Before Joon Sung Park and I had ever met, he simulated the conversation. What questions would Mario, or a person like Mario, ask him? What would I find most interesting to dig into? I do not know how closely I adhered to my facsimile, though I wish I did.

Joon has an advantage in rehearsing these encounters, and thousands of others. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Simile, an applied AI company building a foundation model of human behavior. That involves creating digital twins of real people – like a writer or podcaster – and simulating how they might react to certain circumstances. As you might imagine, that’s an attractive proposition for many companies: CVS Health, for instance, can test a new pricing policy against thousands of simulated patients. A bank can model how customers will react before announcing a fee change. Joon’s ambitions stretch far beyond these cases, though, and Simile has raised more than $300 million, most recently at a $2 billion valuation, to pursue them.

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Episode Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/i/222804125/transcript

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Every timestamp

00:00 Intro

02:11 What Simile is

03:14 Learning to predict human behavior

04:33 From Schelling’s agent-based models to AI simulations

07:40 What drew Joon to simulations and how the idea took shape

10:32 Joon’s sci-fi inspirations

14:20 The ethical questions raised by simulation

15:34 How Joon got into art

17:58 Art that reveals deeper meaning

22:48 The artist’s framing and its role in simulation

27:04 A Simile customer journey

30:46 How Simile gathers data

37:55 Gaining trust

42:59 Public vs. hidden data and how Simile collects it

45:55 Use cases for simulation, from legal strategy to finding a partner

48:29 SimReddit

51:06 Using simulation internally at Simile

52:43 Surprising results from an EV simulation

54:27 Simile’s “siblings”

56:00 Simulation for investing

58:13 Winning in a simulated world

1:00:58 Joon’s hiring philosophy and his own contradictory superpowers

1:06:22 Final meditations

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Resources

• Simile: https://www.simile.com
• Schelling’s model of segregation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling%27s_model_of_segregation
• Wicked problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
• On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258
• Psychohistory: https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Psychohistory
• Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442
• Fresh Air: https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air
• Wiz: https://www.wiz.io
• The Rehearsal on HBO Max: https://www.hbomax.com/show/609d8b4c-f0a6-4a5d-b9d3-bb0f2e207efb
• Remainder: https://www.amazon.com/Remainder-Tom-McCarthy/dp/0307278352
• The 36 Questions That Lead to Love: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html
• Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3526113.3545616
• Moltbook: https://www.moltbook.com/
• Triptych: https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/triptych-1

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Where to find Joon Sung Park

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joonspark

Website: https://www.joonsungpark.com

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