Simile does not aim to create super-rational machines good at coding or math; it aims to model the subjective half of the human brain — people's values, preferences, taste, and the same biases and mistakes humans make.
Joon distinguishes Simile from frontier LLM companies: Simile models human subjectivity and error, not super-rational intelligence, so its agents make the same mistakes humans would. ✦ AI generated
Joon Sung Park · 20VC · 2026-08-01 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 7:18
“How do you think about the relationship, for those listening, between an OpenAI Anthropic frontier model provider and you?”
If you look at large language model companies today, fundamentally the task they have at hand is to create super rational intelligent machines that are good at coding, that are good at natural sciences and mathematics. Similarly doesn't really care about any of those. What we care about is if we have a person make a mistake in this context, we want our models to make the same kind of mistake. We want our models to be biased in the same way humans are. In a way, we want to be a representation of people's values, preferences, and taste. Sort of their subjective half of their brain.
verbatim transcript · starts at 7:18
7:18machines that are good at coding, that are good at natural sciences and mathematics. Similarly doesn't really care about any of those. What we care about is if we have a person make a mistake in this context, we want our models to make the same kind of mistake. We want our models to be biased in the same way humans are. In a way, we want to be a representation of
7:40people's values, preferences, and taste. Sort of their subjective half of their brain. That's what we care about. >> I love that. A lot of what people say is different to a lot of what people do. How do you think about the chasm of what people say and what people do and how that impacts your models? >> For sure. So, say to give us real and you know, if
8:04you look at the web data, it is fundamentally data of what people have said, not what they have done. And obviously, things models today are trained uh preliminary mainly on this web data. For us, we actually do collect a lot of behavior data. We collect uh transaction data. We collect observational data. We also partner with our uh customers, uh our vendors to collect some of this data.
- ·Frontier LLMs aim for super-rational machines, good at coding/math/science
- ·Simile doesn't care about those capabilities
- ·Aims to model people's values, preferences, and taste
- ·Represents the subjective half of the brain
- ·If a person errs in a context, Simile models err the same way
- ·Models are intentionally biased like humans
- ·Goal: faithful representation of human judgment