Andi’s Writeup

Researchers have developed Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior across a wide range of psychological experiments[1]. Built by fine-tuning Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B language model on a dataset called Psych-101, Centaur was trained on over 10 million choices made by 60,000 participants across 160 psychology experiments[1:1].

The model outperforms existing cognitive models in predicting human behavior, even generalizing to entirely new scenarios it wasn’t trained on[1:2]. “You can basically run experimental sessions in silico instead of running them on actual human participants,” said Marcel Binz, cognitive scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI[2].

Centaur demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in capturing human cognition:

  • Predicts behavior with 64% accuracy across varied tasks[3]
  • Generalizes to modified experimental scenarios, like switching from “spaceships” to “magic carpets” in decision-making tasks[4]
  • Shows alignment between its internal representations and human neural activity[1:3]
  • Performs well on out-of-distribution tasks in moral decision-making, economic games, and logical reasoning[1:4]

“It’s the first model that can do any kind of task exactly like a human can,” said Russ Poldrack, cognitive scientist at Stanford University[4:1].


  1. Nature - A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Nature - This AI ‘thinks’ like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies ↩︎

  3. Live Science - New AI is better at predicting how we behave than ever before, scientists say ↩︎

  4. Gigazine - A basic model ‘Centaur’ that predicts human responses in psychological experiments has appeared ↩︎ ↩︎