// TECHCRUNCH — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
42AI comes out of stealth with $62.5M and a world model that can ‘predict human behavior’
Here’s a question straight out of sci-fi: What if AI could predict what you were going to do before you decided to, even in a completely new situation?
Israeli startup 42AI says it is developing a “behavioral world model” that can do just that, and it has just come out of stealth with $62.5 million in seed funding. The company is initially running its predictive system at a handful of financial brokerages, where it says the model can help predict how individual traders will respond to volatile conditions.
“Behavior is not deterministic; it’s constantly probabilistic,” 42AI’s CEO and co-founder Amit Gal-Or told TechCrunch when I asked him to justify his company’s tall claim. He argues that people have underlying psychological tendencies that influence their decisions even when their circumstances change, and that’s what the startup is trying to measure and convert into data that the model can understand.
“A week from now, you might be a different person, but your tendencies will always play out in certain areas to a probability or distribution,” his co-founder and CTO Ehud Ezra added. And that, the company argues, is what the model does: show the probability of a person making a certain decision.
42AI says the model tries to figure out people’s internal motivations instead of extrapolating patterns based on their previous actions. To do that, 42AI examines how people react to seemingly unrelated events. For an investor or trader, for example, such events might include completing KYC processes, onboarding, support calls, money transfers, or trading stocks.
“When the person is talking to support or sales in the initial process […] we’re looking at the sentiment, we’re looking at the voice, we’re looking at a lot of interactions that they’re doing, how many times do they call, and so forth,” added CTO and co-founder Ehud Ezra. “And all of those data points are going into the model. Later on, you have the interactions: how you buy and sell, and when, and we’re looking at the market at that stage.”
“So we’re trying to look at how they’re looking at the world. In a world model, every individual is the world,” he added.
The company then converts those observations into mathematical representations of traits, which are then fed into a transformer-based world model that lays out probabilities for possible decisions under different circumstances. (The company uses a separate language model to generate explanations for its predictions).
Ezra said the model is trained to preserve a person’s underlying tendencies during simulations. So if someone is usually risk-averse, but the model suddenly treats them as a risk-taker, “the target is off,” he said, explaining how the model’s training rewards are structured.
42AI spent three years developing this approach, combining psychological research with neuroscience and genetics, as well as advice from experts in psychology and PTSD, and Dan Shechtman, who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.