Michael Bernstein
778 posts
@msbernst
@stanford Professor of Computer Science, @simile_ai co-founder, nationally bestselling author. I build interactive, social, and societal tech.
I’m one month into @SimileAI, and I’m even more convinced that evals for simulating human behavior is one of the most interesting problems in AI. That's why we’re growing our small-but-mighty Evals team by hiring multiple Evals -- MTS roles in SF + NYC. jobs.ashbyhq.com/simile/33d7507…
The advanced civilizations of sci-fi legend (Banks, Asimov, etc) have some form of simulation to guide society. @joon_s_pk is taking a crack at building that simulator with @simile_ai. As Joon's cofounder @percyliang puts it: great science starts with a great measurement. From Smallville in 2023 to today, Simile is trying to build the Hubble Telescope equivalent for simulating human behavior. 00:00 Introduction 01:49 Building Generative Agents 02:29 Valentines Day Emergence 03:33 From GPT 3 To Agents 05:03 Social Computing Problem 06:19 Social Simulacra Subreddits 07:57 Models Getting Good Enough 08:57 Humans Are Not Rational 10:04 Turning Research Into Simuli 11:55 Validation And Accuracy Proof 12:43 Customer Workflow CVS Example 16:11 Why Collect Real Data 17:51 Behavioral Signals And RCTs 21:52 Use Cases And Second Order Effects 26:31 Evaluating Convergence Divergence 31:58 Big Societal Simulations Ahead 36:08 Future Of Simulation
After over 10 years at Stanford, it's time to leave :) I will be joining UT Austin's CS department as an assistant professor in fall 2027! If you're excited to envision the future of interaction with AI, I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle. Come join me!
After an extraordinary chapter at @OpenAI, I’ve joined @simile_ai to define what rigorous evals look like for AI systems that simulate human behavior. It’s one of those rare roles where a strange collection of career obsessions suddenly belongs in the same room.
hey! I recently left Figma and joined @simile_ai as founding designer. I’m stoked to help shape future paradigms for how people interact with simulations. also….we're hiring in NYC & SF 👀 if this sounds like your kind of problem, come build with us!
hey! I recently left Figma and joined @simile_ai as founding designer. I’m stoked to help shape future paradigms for how people interact with simulations. also….we're hiring in NYC & SF 👀 if this sounds like your kind of problem, come build with us!
Big news! @Stanford is merging @StanfordHAI & Stanford Data Science into a single institute, led by @landay. Continuing under the HAI name, the institute seeks to advance AI & data science for discovery, transform education, and shape AI’s societal impact: news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/0…
Once you have JIT objectives, you can embed them into various LLM architectures via existing generators and evaluators. Evaluations on N=205 participant-provided inputs show that JIT objectives produce user-preferred outputs, whether generating experts, tools, or feedback.
2. Mapping the Spiral of Silence: Surveying Unspoken Opinions in Online Communities w/ @Diyi_Yang @msbernst We introduce a human–AI pipeline to measure the spiral of silence across political subreddits, revealing how community design shapes when people choose to stay silent online. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00952
1. Value Alignment of Social Media Ranking Algorithms w/ @FarnazJ_ @tizianopiccardi @_ziv_e Zach Robertson @sanmikoyejo @msbernst We present a generalizable method for aligning social media feeds to users’ values, showing with 400+ users that value-driven rankings produce meaningfully aligned feeds using their own Twitter data. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14434
Most of what I actually need help with, I never think to tell a model. But why is it on me to remember? Our new paper asks: what if AI could proactively specialize to individuals and the tasks they’re carrying out at this very moment? 🧵
