humans& with Alexis Ross, Manya Bansal, and Niloofar Mireshghallah - Weaviate Podcast #145!

Alexis, Manya, and Niloofar from humans& join the Weaviate Podcast to introduce Persimmon, a user model built to simulate how humans actually behave in multi-turn, multi-party conversations. Persimmon is explicitly not an assistant, a companion, or a Character AI-style stand-in, it is a research preview aimed at faithfully capturing the distribution of human behavior. This includes the natural friction of frustration, excitement, and group dynamics that assistant chatbots trained to be helpful never exhibit. Alexis, Manya, and Niloofar bring a striking mix of backgrounds to the problem: AI t