---
id: people/percy-liang
about:
  label: Percy Liang
  description: >-
    Stanford computer scientist, co-author of the generative agents work that
    simulates people with language models, and a co-founder of Simile.
  tags:
    - foundation models
    - machine learning
    - generative agents
person:
  affiliation: Stanford University
  role: computer scientist
  homepage: 'https://cs.stanford.edu/~pliang/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Percy Liang (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Liang'
    - title: Percy Liang (his Stanford page)
      url: 'https://cs.stanford.edu/~pliang/'
    - title: Simulating human behavior | Simile
      url: 'https://www.simile.com/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Percy Liang teaches computer science at Stanford University and founded its Center for Research on Foundation Models, which he directs.[^1,2] He studied at MIT and took his PhD at UC Berkeley in 2011, advised by Michael Jordan and Dan Klein.[^1,2] Simile credits him with creating SQuAD and HELM.[^3] His CodaLab Worksheets platform keeps the full provenance of an experiment from raw data to final results.[^2] His current project, Marin, builds language models in the open, with experiments preregistered and visible as they run.[^2]

He co-advised Joon Sung Park's doctorate with Michael Bernstein and is an author of the papers that built simulated people from language models.[^2] He is a co-founder and chief scientist of Simile, which sells those simulations.[^3]

On the wiki he is an author of [Generative Agents](/engines/generative-agents/), of [Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People](/articles/park-generative-agents-1000-people/) and of [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](/articles/santurkar-whose-opinions-do-language-models-reflect/), which measured how far language models' answers sit from those of real groups of Americans. [Simile](/engines/simile/) names him among its founders.