Artificial intelligence startup Simile has raised US$100 million in funding to build a limited learning model designed to attempt to predict human behavior, including by helping companies anticipate questions likely to be asked on earnings calls.
The financing, announced on Thursday last week, was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Hanabi Capital. Other people, including Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, contributed to the round. Simile did not disclose a valuation.
Simile spun out from Stanford University and assumed a more public profile this week after spending seven months developing an AI model trained on interviews with numerous real people about their lives. The company fed its system data on historic transactions and text from scientific journals focused on behavioral experiments.
PhOTO: Reuters
The startup said it aims to use its technology to anticipate decisions a person might make in any given situation. To do that, it builds simulations populated by AI agents that represent the preferences of real people.
“In a recent earnings call, we simulated, we actually predicted, eight out of 10 questions that were actually asked on this call,” Simile CEO Joon Park said in a Bloomberg Television interview.
“Simile is a real combination of amazing frontier researchers but also amazing product and engineering talent,” Park said.
The company’s approach might provide another option for companies beyond relying on focus groups. CVS Health Corp has been using the model for five months to create AI agents that represent real customers instead of human-driven focus groups, according to Simile. CVS has been able to inform decisions about what items to stock up on and display in stores.
Simile said its technology can help companies better prepare for questions that analysts might pose on earnings calls or attempt to predict how a particular corporate announcement might be received by analyzing prior calls and research.
The startup is led by founding members Park, Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang and Lainie Yallen, all of whom have ties to Stanford. Bernstein, in particular, is the co-author, along with Li, of the influential ImageNet project, which set a benchmark for computer vision technology.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
TRANSITION: With the closure, the company would reorganize its Taiwanese unit to a sales and service-focused model, Bridgestone said Bridgestone Corp yesterday announced it would cease manufacturing operations at its tire plant in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), affecting more than 500 workers. Bridgestone Taiwan Co (台灣普利司通) said in a statement that the decision was based on the Tokyo-based tire maker’s adjustments to its global operational strategy and long-term market development considerations. The Taiwanese unit would be reorganized as part of the closure, effective yesterday, and all related production activities would be concluded, the statement said. Under the plan, Bridgestone would continue to deepen its presence in the Taiwanese market, while transitioning to a sales and service-focused business model, it added. The Hsinchu
RSS