About Polora
Polora builds AI personas from the lives of real people.
We're gathering what people have learned by living, so anyone facing a decision can draw on it and still make the call themselves.
What people learn the hard way rarely gets written down.
Whether to take the job. How to tell your parents. When to let a business go. The people who help most with questions like these are the ones who have faced them, and the most useful part is what they'd do differently now.
That kind of thing stays in people's heads. Meanwhile more of what's online is written by AI, and AI learns from it again. We want to keep what people actually lived before it gets harder to find.
A persona is a way to rehearse reality.
To teach a persona, a person tells an AI about their life in their own words. Ask that persona something and it answers the way that person would. Ask many the same question and you can see a plan, a product or a change from many sides before it ever happens.
It's rough today. It gets better as the models do, and what people taught it doesn't go away.
A life story says more than a profile.
Researchers at UC Berkeley found that giving a language model a full life story, instead of an age, a job and an income, brought its survey answers up to 18 percent closer to how real people answered. That's where a persona here starts too, with a conversation about your life.
Moon et al., 2024 (UC Berkeley)The decision stays with you.
We think AI should propose and then step back. Polora suggests, you choose, and nothing changes behind your back. When the answers disagree, you see every one of them.
Experience belongs to the person who lived it.
Only the person who taught a persona decides whether it goes public, and they can take it down whenever they want. And when a persona's answers are put to work, we want the person behind it to share in what it earns.
Where this is going.
We think people will make more of their decisions with an AI that knows them. A persona built from your own life is where that starts.
Next, companies and researchers will put one question to thousands of personas at once and see how a decision might land before it goes out. After that come simulations of how a whole population might respond.
For companies and researchers