Richard Socher: CEO and founder of You.com and AIX Ventures
The Future of AI-Powered Search
As part of series of dinners on Generative AI at SV Icons, we met with Richard Socher - CEO and co-founder of You.com, an AI-powered search engine that offers personalized search experience. Richard is also 4th most cited NLP researcher and a co-founder at AIX Ventures - fund that invests in AI powered companies only.
Interestingly, Richard developed the first version of a search engine (future You.com) while doing his Stanford PhD. He thought at the time it was too audacious, especially with Google being on this massive rise.
It was well spent two hours with Richard, and here are 8 key takeaways from our conversation:
LLMs and larger datasets/compute have enabled progress but search hasn't improved in 10 years, creating demand for an alternative like You.com. You.com incorporated multi-modal search earlier than others. ChatGPT validated You.com's vision with its chat interface, leading to millions of users for You.com.
LLMs could dominate the internet integrated into everything. Collaborative LLMs on platforms could replace most apps and interact with nearly all economic activity. Predicting text is nearly AI-complete.
Fears of LLMs causing harm are overblown (Richard doesn’t side with those who signed the Open Letter on pausing AI), and many companies and countries will develop their own models. By year-end, an open model matching GPT-4 will exist!
Ads and monetization will change. Ads integrated in content and limits improving search/AI may lead to new approaches. SEO and content creation skills will adapt. Many valuable jobs will change.
The biggest unsolved NLP problems are prompt/model engineering to embed tasks in models, factuality and accuracy especially in summaries, and general purpose models for niche tasks like sentiment analysis.
LLMs enable quick verification and sticking to facts, that’s why it works well for search or coding. A "search-do" engine combining old search and new co-creation/accomplishment possibilities may emerge.
As a serial entrepreneur, Richard has two main recommendations to founders:
o Do not run out of money. You should have money for your runway and growth, and growth solves a lot of problems
o Pay extra attention to building the team. He notes that building a team and managing people is hardest. Find those with the right culture, professionalism, conduct, not just talent. If 10/10 on intellect but lacking elsewhere, hire 7-8/10 with strong work ethic, motivation and EQ.
Organizer: Aizada Marat and Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov
Contributor: David Vernal