Simulating Humanity: from Generative Agents to 8 Billion Digital Twins — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI

Joon Sung Park, co-founder and CEO of Simile, traces his path from painting to the Smallville generative agents paper and explains how Simile builds behavioral foundation models and digital twins. The conversation covers why frontier models fail to reproduce irrational human behavior, the role of interviews, observational data, and randomized controlled trials, the 85% accuracy result, scaling laws for simulation, Schelling's agent-based models, the economics of simulating large populations, and the long-term vision of simulating 8 billion people to tackle problems like climate change and democratic instability.