{"id":328888,"date":"2026-03-08T21:54:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T21:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/328888\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T21:54:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T21:54:14","slug":"an-ai-company-apparently-inspired-by-the-sims-wants-to-revolutionize-public-opinion-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/328888\/","title":{"rendered":"An AI Company Apparently Inspired by \u2018the Sims\u2019 Wants to Revolutionize Public Opinion Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

The reputation of public opinion polls is not in a good place right now\u2014or at least it wasn\u2019t right before the 2024 election<\/a>, and it\u2019s hard to imagine the situation has improved much. A new company recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal<\/a> is asking the bold question, hey, what if we just replaced all that with AI? <\/p>\n

It\u2019s called Simile, and it was just awarded $100 million in venture capital from Index Ventures, the Journal says. <\/p>\n

According to its website<\/a>, Simile claims to be \u201cdeveloping a foundation model that predicts human behavior in any situation, at any scale.\u201d <\/p>\n

The company\u2019s 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 \u201cdigital twins\u201d or \u201cdigital clones\u201d of their human counterparts. Actual data from people\u2019s behaviors and consumer habits are added to make sure the clones are accurate. Then, market insights can then be derived\u2014ostensibly at least\u2014by having market researchers talk to or poll those \u201cclones.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Simile customers are allowed to, as the Journal puts it, \u201cask infinite questions of their AI people.\u201d<\/p>\n

This AI people idea may sound a little familiar.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is a famous simulation of consumerism\u2014actually intended to be a parody of consumerism<\/a>, its creator would later explain to the New Yorker. It\u2019s called the Sims, and it\u2019s a video game that simulates quotidian reality.<\/p>\n

While the Sims is not mentioned in the Journal\u2019s story about Simile, it\u2019s no secret that Simile took inspiration from it. A research paper from 2023, co-authored by Park<\/a>, is about an effort to simulate human behavior. \u201cWe 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,\u201d the paper\u2019s abstract says.<\/p>\n

The agents in the paper have overarching desires, and interact with one another without being on rails. The paper<\/a> provides the following sample conversation that occurs at a grocery store inside the simulation:<\/p>\n

Sam: Hey Tom, how\u2019s it going?
Tom: Good, thanks. What\u2019s up?
Sam: Well, I wanted to talk to you about something. I\u2019m actually running for mayor in the upcoming local election.
Tom: Really? That\u2019s great news! Why are you running?
Sam: I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

A CVS executive named Sri Narasimhan\u2014job title: \u201cvice president of enterprise customer experience and insights\u201c\u2014has been interacting with Simile\u2019s simulated people according to the Journal, and says the tool is \u201ca really big unlock for us,\u201d and that, \u201cIt\u2019s not like I have to stop with how many questions I asked. There\u2019s no fatigue.\u201d <\/p>\n

For instance, in the Journal\u2019s telling, Narasimhan has been quizzing simulated people about pet medicine, \u201cfinding that people don\u2019t consider giving their pets medication a chore.\u201d Huge if true.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, apparently, CVS is about to scale up its \u201croster\u201d to one hundred thousand simulated people, and query them on \u201cstore layouts and new product designs.\u201d <\/p>\n

Simile also has a partnership with Gallup\u2014designed to simulate the experience of asking a policy question to a large group. On its website<\/a>, there\u2019s a sample of what this is supposed to look like once it works: essentially a chatbot prompting window with the words \u201cWhat should I ask the group?\u201d in gray font over the text entry field. \u201cModel decisions against real-world sentiment \u2014 transparent, replicable, and empirically validated,\u201d the page offers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The reputation of public opinion polls is not in a good place right now\u2014or at least it wasn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328889,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,28686,3168,125,162447],"class_list":{"0":"post-328888","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-market-research","14":"tag-polls","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-the-sims"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}