What we build, why it isn't just "AI roleplay," what simulating the world actually looks like, and how to try it for yourself.
AI tools that simulate how the world works and how it became what it is. Three are underway: Echo, which distills how specific historical figures thought into runnable thinking systems; a simulator of personal histories, which reconstructs what one ordinary life felt like inside a real historical moment; and End of Dynasty, our most ambitious simulation yet — still under wraps. Different grains of one question — history as it happened, lives as they were lived, and the timelines that could have been.
Roleplay improvises; we distill. Every Echo is built from primary works, letters, and modern scholarship, and every quotation is labeled by provenance — documented, attested, attributed, or legendary. Each mental model carries the era-assumption it rests on, an anachronism protocol keeps the figure from "knowing" anything past their death, and a moral-distance declaration preserves difficult era-views without sanitizing or amplifying them. The result is a thinking system you can interrogate, not a costume.
It means choosing a grain — a mind, a life, an institution, a whole society — and letting its behavior unfold from documented starting conditions instead of a script. Echo works at the grain of a single cognition; the personal-histories simulator at the grain of one lifetime; and End of Dynasty at a larger grain still. The standard we hold ourselves to is scholarly: the structure comes from the record, and where we invent, we mark the seams.
Echo is released under the MIT license — its echoes, their sources, and the distillation workflow are all open. Our other projects are evaluated case by case as they mature; where we can open them we will, and we'll always be explicit about what is open and what isn't.
No formal openings posted yet — but we're a young lab and we talk early to people we'd want to build with, especially researchers in simulation, history, cognition, and ML infrastructure. If that's you, reach out through the Contact page and send along what you've made.
The fastest taste is the live Lu Xun demo on this site — a single Echo you can talk to in your browser. The full Echo toolkit is open source for anyone who wants to run or extend it, and our other projects will open up as they're ready. Tell us on the Contact page which figure or period you'd want to see next.