Artificial Societies

Artificial Societies uses AI to simulate human societies. Companies like Anthropic are using Artificial Societies to predict how their marketing and content will perform in a simulation of their target customers, before launching in the real world. This is a cracked team: James left rural China at age 14, got into Cambridge, turned down a CS PhD to do startups, and - in his spare time - lead the largest ever study of an LLM society. James is joined by Patrick, an applied behavioural scientist who has run over 200 real-world experiments for businesses including Fortune 500 companies. We joined forces through a shared frustration that no one really understands large scale human behaviours: traditional market research is not only slow and expensive, but fundamentally flawed - it misses how people influence each other. Humans are not isolated individuals, we are social animals. We began by simulating 1,000 investors to test startup pitches, which we used ourselves to get into YC and secure pre-seed investment. Since releasing this publicly as “Wave”, startup founders have run over 3000 simulations, deploying over 2.6bn LLM tokens in the process. We have since released "Reach", where anyone can simulate their own LinkedIn audience and test how their posts will perform before posting for real. Artificial Societies is doing for simulations what ChatGPT did for LLMs - making them accessible to everyone. As AI advances, we will create representative models of entire human societies. Our vision is a world where all content, products, and policies are first simulated in an Artificial Society. We are on a mission to create Artificial Collective Intelligence - humans innovate in collectives, we want to scale collective innovation with ACI.