Felix Wallis

Head of Research @societies_ai | Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@twttle yooo, twttle is back!

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@itsalfredw

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@yunta_tsai Shit, glad I don’t have any IoT devices 😬

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@societies_ai Recommend reading this blog alongside our launch post to understand why Rothko will be essential for scaling human-agent collaboration!
https://t.co/MXWpN551qo

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@james_k_he It's been an awesome experience building this with you and the amazing team at AS! Can't wait to keep scaling Rothko's capabilities and pushing the frontier of behavioural science and ML 👊

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

Increadibly exicted to announce Rothko to the world! For me, it’s been a labour of love that started three years ago when I co-authored the first large-scale paper on AI swarms with @james_k_he.

During this research, James and I noticed that when language models interact at scale, they mimic fundamental characteristics of human collective behaviour without being explicitly instructed to do so.

These findings suggested something exciting: pre-training bakes an inherent understanding of human group dynamics into language models.

Despite our excitement, we also noticed that RLHF works against LLMs’ emergent simulation capabilities, compressing the nuances we observe in human behaviour and pulling models towards a population mode.

Hence, we faced an interesting question: can we use and enhance language models’ pretraining knowledge to accurately simulate human societies?

Rothko represents the culmination of these efforts. It works like a decision model trained on signals we’ve extracted from a large corpus of human behavioural observations, including anonymised social media information, transaction histories, unstructured interviews, and more.

By getting rid of RLHF post-training, moving from the domain of natural language to the domain of decisions, and training on behavioural data, we’ve seen that Rothko dramatically outperforms SOTA LLMs at accurately simulating individuals and groups.

This finding underpins our work at AS and the value our simulation platform provides to clients.

Looking ahead, I see a world where large decision models like Rothko play a fundamental role in scaling innovation, protecting sovereignty, and aligning AI swarms with human values.

I find these applications incredibly exciting, and I look forward to scaling Rothko’s capabilities with the awesome team at AS!

[Artificial Societies @societies_ai]

Introducing Rothko, a foundation model of human behaviour designed from the ground up to simulate the world’s most consequential decisions.

Rothko is the result of over three years of frontier research at the intersection of behavioural science and machine learning.

We’re only just starting to uncover the model’s value across domains ranging from market research to AI safety and swarm alignment.

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@VGD508 @societies_ai Next gen bitcoin mining

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@vdchdry @societies_ai Based

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@strbrmatchaa @societies_ai Believe this just happened to be the number of personas in our US Gen Pop society

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@zbizika @societies_ai Would you like a million dollars?

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@emax @simile_ai We do better growth stunts

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@Court_Reinland @societies_ai Yes

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@KamilStanuch @societies_ai Goddam

[Artificial Societies @societies_ai]

Can your idea become the talk of the town?

We modelled how thoughts and ideas spread in human societies by putting 2,721 simulated personas representing the US general population in an artificial city. Each persona has its own schedule, beliefs, and social circle.

Sow an idea in any persona’s mind, watch it take hold and go viral, or see it fizzle out if no one takes interest in it.

Compete with your friends and colleagues to see whose idea can win over the most adopters, get a high score and put your name on the leaderboard. Link below.

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@ClaraOnAI @egorvert Hey xx

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@societies_ai new simile

[Artificial Societies @societies_ai]

Artificial Societies is sponsoring POLITICO London Playbook.

The Budget is coming next week, and the measures under discussion will land differently with various audiences. Every day this week, we’re simulating how those audiences will react to potential Budget measures.

Today, we’ve simulated how global institutional investors will react to the Budget. What do they think will happen to gilts? Find out below.

[will depue @willdepue]

Just like when the world realized, with the arrival of the iPhone that maybe you would, as your teachers disputed, “always have a calculator in your pocket”, I’m beginning to realize I will never have to be good at doing my digital chores again.

I can relax about my complete ADHD-driven incompetence in filling out my taxes, or responding to emails, or paying my bills, as I will always have an executive assistant in my pocket. A new era is here

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@jesstoudic @societies_ai Trying to keep up with the skill of our design team is hard work 😅

[Felix Wallis @WallisFelix]

@egorvert Very cool!