Richard Socher (You.com): AI is revolutionising search
AI researcher and You.com founder Richard Socher on the Handelsblatt podcast: how he wants to revolutionise the world of search engines with a chat-first model.
Founder Richard Socher wants to take on Google with his AI-powered search engine You.com. In the podcast he explains his chat-first model.
Silicon Valley correspondent Stephan Scheuer talks in this episode of Handelsblatt Disrupt with renowned AI researcher Richard Socher about how artificial intelligence can revolutionise the way we search the web. Socher is founder and CEO of You.com.
Unlike Google, the start-up uses a chat-first model, summarising search results in a conversational answer with the most important information. The aim is to make search simpler and more intuitive. “The world of language processing has improved so dramatically, and I have now been working on language processing for over a decade. At the same time, the biggest application of language processing – the search engine – has not improved much,” Socher says.
Socher began researching neural networks for language processing during his PhD at Stanford University, at a time when the field was still met with scepticism. His papers were regularly rejected at first. Today neural networks are indispensable to language processing and are deployed across almost every area of business. In the podcast Socher explains how he eventually convinced the language-processing community of his work, why Google is stuck in an innovator’s dilemma, and what challenges You.com faces.