Tuesday, February 17, 2026

"Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy Back a New A.I. Use Case: Simulating Human Behavior"

From Observer, February 13:

Backed by Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, Simile aims to model how real people think at scale. 

Every three months, public companies brace for analyst questions during quarterly earnings calls. But what if firms could predict these queries in advance and rehearse their responses? That’s one of the capabilities touted by Simile, a new A.I. startup spun out of Stanford and backed by acclaimed researcher Fei-Fei Li and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy

Simile emerged from stealth yesterday (Feb. 12) with $100 million in funding from a round led by Index Ventures. Alongside Li and Karpathy, the startup—which hasn’t disclosed its valuation—also counts investors including Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo and Scott Belsky, a partner at A24 Films.

Li and Karpathy both have close ties to Simile’s founding team, which includes Stanford researchers Joon Park, Percy Liang and Michael Bernstein. Li is the co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered A.I. Institute and advised Karpathy during his Ph.D. study at the university. She is widely known for foundational work such as ImageNet, a large-scale image database that helped drive major breakthroughs in computer vision. Karpathy and Bernstein also contributed to that project....

....MUCH MORE 

"Okay, when the analyst says 'Great quarter', you say..."