The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Saturday, August 1, 2026
Joon Sung Park explained that Semily differentiates itself from other AI companies like OpenAI by focusing on simulating human subjectivity, values, and biases, rather than pure rationality. Semily aims for its models to make similar 'mistakes' and exhibit the same biases as humans. Their data collection prioritizes understanding cause, mechanism, and counterfactuals over simple prediction.
“Similarly, doesn't really care about any of those. What we care about is if we have a person making a mistake in this context, we want our models to make the same kind of mistake. We want our models to be biased in the same way humans are.”
“In a way, we want to be a representation of people's values, preferences, and taste. So their subjective half of their brain.”
“The kind of data that we care deeply about is a lot of randomized control trials. We actually run a lot of A/B testing.”