Summary
In season 3 episode 6 of the Dr. Pawd podcast, Pieter Abbeel hosts Richard Socher - renowned AI researcher, entrepreneur and investor. Richard, who pioneered early breakthroughs in deep learning for natural language processing while pursuing his PhD at Stanford, declined top-tier professorship offers to found one of the earliest deep learning start-ups - Metamind, which applied deep learning in real world applications across language and image processing and was later acquired by Salesforce.
Richard left Salesforce to start his latest company - u.com, which directly takes on Google's core business of search, offering an open platform for search apps, and aims to be more equitable in its search results and user privacy. The platform has faced challenges and rejections since its inception, but Richard remained persistent in pursuing his vision. u.com's core feature is search that offers a different experience than Google's search through a large language model that provides detailed information and sources.
In addition to personalized news, notes and bookmarks, the comprehensive search engine is also gaining users and positive feedback. Richard's latest venture, You.com, takes things up a notch through detailed and relevant answers to user queries using large language models and multimodal outputs like images, graphs, and interactive apps. It allows users more control over their sources and prioritizes privacy while committing to eliminating targeted ads.
A critical part of the technology behind this search engine is "You Chat," which provides access to the web and pertinent sources to give more accurate answers and cite sources in responses. Richard uses the jobs-to-be-done framework to understand user needs and provide efficient solutions, including enabling users to take action directly from search results. Monetization strategies for You.com include ads based only on user queries and not on the user themselves, and an open app platform for developers to build their search app.
The podcast also discusses search and ads' importance to Google's revenue and the drawbacks of zero-click searches keeping users on their platform. Richard emphasizes the significance of an open platform like u.com to allow others to participate on the first page of search results, with approximately 250 apps and an open app store.
The episode goes on to discuss Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). There are three significant roadblocks to achieving AGI: the lack of reasoning in AI, the limited range of the objective functions that AI sets for itself compared to human ability, and the difficulty of multitask learning. The podcast highlights the importance of language as a manifestation of human intelligence and its potential to connect many modalities.
Richard's work in NLP and early success in deep learning, despite initial skepticism from others, are also discussed. He taught the first neural net for NLP debate after realizing that no one was teaching this topic, despite working in a job in Metamind. Richard was offered professor positions at top universities after finishing his PhD but decided to work on AI startups instead, spurred on by consulting work. Richard's numerous investments, including AIX ventures, are discussed.
The podcast also talks about AI's numerous applications, from optimizing cancer drug testing to reducing greenhouse gases using AI-optimized cow diets and developing an AI hearing aid to filter out background noise. The podcast emphasizes the significance of taking a break to prevent local optimization after discussing Richard's love of photography, paramotoring, and playing the computer game, Zero Ad.
In conclusion, season 3 episode 6 of the Dr. Pawd podcast provides an in-depth discussion of Richard Socher's career, his AI start-up ventures as well as his current projects, alongside insights into AI's potential applications and achieving AGI.
