Joel is a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and visiting professor at King's College London. He obtained his PhD from MIT where he studied computational neuroscience and machine learning with Tomaso Poggio. Joel is interested in reverse engineering human biological and cultural evolution to inform the development of artificial intelligence that is simultaneously human-like and human-compatible. In particular, Joel believes that theories of cooperation from fields like cultural evolution and institutional economics can be fruitfully applied to inform the development of ethical and effective artificial intelligence technology.

The Concordia Generative Social Simulation Platform

Concordia uses language models to create open-ended world simulations that work like tabletop role-playing games. We use it to construct rich agent-based models where simulated agents can interact through a natural language interface. We build Concordia environments to study the emergence of social-scale phenomena from the interactions of complex and capable individuals e.g. cooperation in mixed-motive social dilemma situations where the agents can talk to each other and interact with their world in natural language. We also use it as a playground to explore cognitive modeling ideas with generative agents.

Concordia is the context in which we developed our theory of appropriateness, and it is a core piece of infrastructure supporting our further work in this area. Of course, one need not buy our theory to use the platform. Concordia is helpful as a modeling platform for any part of computational social-cognitive science where it is desirable to have (1) incompletely specified game structures that may or may not feature explicit reward signals, (2) fully open-ended interactions (i.e.,  "large worlds" in the sense of Savage), (3) relatively complex agents, capable of conversing with one another in natural language, and (4) flexible mixing per environment of hand-coded "grounded" variables and open-ended "hallucinated" variables.

Concordia is open source: github repo.

Publications


Selected (old) conference abstracts