On The Robot Brains Podcast, host and AI researcher Andrew Ng talks with Richard Socher, AI researcher, entrepreneur, and You.com founder, about building an AI-powered search engine, his research and startup career, and where AI may go next.
Socher says search could be a high-impact use for natural language processing, but the experience had stagnated while advertising and privacy concerns grew. He started You.com to make search more useful for learning and decision-making, while acknowledging the risk and stress of competing with an established default.
Socher describes You.com combining language models with recent web sources and citations. It can respond with formats suited to the task, such as a stock chart, code snippet, image generator, or restaurant map, and lets users control which sources they see. He says an open platform lets developers contribute search apps, with about 250 apps available at the time of the conversation.
Asked about the path to AGI, Socher identifies three research challenges: combining statistical learning with logical reasoning, enabling models to set objectives, and improving multitask learning across modalities. He traces his own NLP work to the idea that neural networks could learn useful language features instead of relying on manually designed ones, despite early paper rejections.
Socher explains that he chose to build MetaMind rather than pursue a professorship, aiming to make AI tools usable across real applications. At Salesforce, his team developed work including contextual language representations, DecaNLP, AI Economist, and protein generation. He later backed founders including Hugging Face and helped start an AI-focused venture fund.
Socher points to applications such as more efficient drug trials, reducing methane from cows through diet optimization, AI hearing aids, and recruiting tools. He distinguishes companies that improve the AI software stack from vertical companies applying it to specific industries. Outside work, he describes Murph workouts, paramotoring, photography, and occasional strategy games.
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Richard Socher, founder and CEO of You.com, discusses AI models, AGI, scientific discovery, agents, and humanoid robots with Peter H. Diamandis and Salim Ismail on Moonshots.
