Michael S. Bernstein is Co-Founder at Simile, an AI startup that predicts human behavior through generative agent simulations. He is on leave from Stanford University until Fall 2026, where he serves as Professor of Computer Science and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Michael holds a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, as well as a master's degree and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. He co-authored the ImageNet project, which established benchmarks for computer vision technology.

Michael is a nationally bestselling author and has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the Computer History Museum's Tech for Humanity Prize. His research has been featured in The New York Times, TED AI, and MIT Technology Review.

Simile raised $100 million led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and notable AI leaders Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy. The company emerged from stealth in February 2026 after seven months of development.

Michael's research focuses on designing social, societal, and interactive technologies, with over 101,000 citations. He previously developed Smallville, a simulation environment demonstrating AI agents can study human behavior patterns.