The Stanford team that invented generative agents wants to kill the focus group

In April 2023, a Stanford PhD student named Joon Sung Park uploaded a paper that made a virtual town famous. Smallville, population 25, ran on large language models. Its AI residents woke up, cooked breakfast, gossiped over coffee. Then, without a single instruction from Park's team, they threw a Valentine's Day party. One agent mentioned the idea to another. That agent invited a third. Within the simulated day, the entire town was coordinating dates and decorations. Park and his co-authors called these creations "generative agents." The citation count crossed 10,000 before Park had even finished his PhD. On GitHub, 20,600 stars and counting.