YouSaid · the spoken record

Rich Socher

lines on the record: 75
first: 2025-04-18
most recent: 2025-04-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“To buy small startups, also maybe get some text benefits or something for it because there's a lot of not invented hear mentality in large European companies. And so you just don't have as much of that ecosystem. I would reduce the barriers to go public so that you have even more benefits for startups and have, you know, they're basically two exit routes, right? You either get acquired or you go public for VCs in the ecosystem. And so you get more VC if both routes work out better. I'll stop there. But I'm going to get asked that push a lot. I try to be helpful when people ask me that question.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of things I would make computer science mandatory subject in all schools a very sought after minor for almost every major in college. I would help people and excite people more. It's also a marketing thing to some degree and just mindset shift for people to start their own companies because every person that cares about outcomes and outputs loves AI. It's only the people who think of how to make money in terms of our spent that might not like AI. And so trying to do some marketing for the populace to have that mindset shift of like, I can make outputs, I can be an owner and creator and then possibly start a sovereign wealth fund so that you can just participate in all the upside of amazing AI technology worldwide, not just like Sovereign Wealth Fund that only invests internally inside the country, but also externally. I'd make it easier for large enterprise.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfortunately, the EU has shot itself in the foot a lot of different kinds of regulation, and in particular, AI regulation destroying a fledgling ecosystem that could never get off the ground.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever I see something that I should be doing, I try to write it down and then I try to work towards it. So I like to think I don't avoid many actions. But I guess when it comes to longevity, like every night I wake up in the morning and I was like, I should have gone to bed earlier last night. And I would probably feel better right now. So maybe that's one thing.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm traveling right now, so it's all screwed up. And that's like, that's actually one of the worst parts of traveling now. It just messes with your sleep. Actually, I stopped drinking last year also for longevity reasons. And life is like 20% less fun, especially in some evenings and so on. But, you know, it is better. But I realized actually after not drinking anymore that the majority of times when I felt bad in the morning traveling wasn't actually from alcohol, it's just from like sleep deprivation and like shitty sleep schedules. So I feel just as bad.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Improving longevity is like one of those AI plus bio corollaries or follows that is just really, really exciting. And I think longevity is massively underrated. And there are a lot of people who are snarky and say, oh, yeah, whatever. I don't care. I want it. All people say that until it's a few days before they're dead and they're in pain and they're like, fuck, I wish I was a little bit healthier, you know, beforehand. And was that really worth it to drink all the time, not sleep enough and so on? So I am trying to be better about it personally.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do get quite extreme too if I get into a zone and then everything is kind of a nuisance and then you just get just really intense about something. I'm also happily married, so that helps not being lonely. But yeah, I don't need people all the time around me. In fact, I'm an introvert. I enjoy, I have sometimes events at my place of like hundreds of people. And I enjoy that a lot. I get sort of, there's an activation energy. And then you're like, all right, I'm now in this mode. But afterwards, I'm like, I don't have to see anyone for like another month now.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Undeniable. In some ways it's beautiful if you do it. But the difference here for me at least is that I'm okay just being remembered by the people that know. Like most people have no idea who invented penicillin. And most people can't name the people who invented the cure for their cancer because they're just like some doctor gave it to me and I got this medication now, right? But the people in the know. And that would be good enough.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of it boils down to sort of how much positive impact you've had in the world that matters enough so that people in the future will still remember it.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has been always the case. Yeah, I was like, I was an academic for a long time. I want to be a professor. I want to do research. I missed the research also now still. I realized at some point you have to care about money because money is one of the best indicators of impact and allows you to do epic, cool things. But I don't intrinsically care about it.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think, like, again, it's very different for consumer. Like, OpenAI actually has a massive number of consumers, and that's super duper powerful. And so, yeah, all of them have advantages. Like Sauna 3.7 is actually the best model for a lot of things, especially in coding and engineering and so on. Like you said, it's a little bit unclear to me. I personally would just, I also just love investing in early stage where you can have 1,000 X's and so on. I just don't see 1,000 X's for those companies.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if you're really sophisticated, you can use the open source more and more. And as the open source models have caught up, it's just very hard to say, this is like super unique technology. It just becomes like for a while in technology, like having a really good database was really powerful. And indeed, there was like, there's an Oracle now. And so if you're really, really crazy large scale, then you might still use an oracle. But for a lot of other folks, they can just use simpler, other smaller databases. And you have that wild horse of”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I said, I think a big one for me was this sort of skepticism about the future. I'll tell you a story. Like one of the co-founders of OpenAI and I started a bet, and I think seven years ago or so where he said we'll have AGI in like nine or ten years. And I was like, I mean, I'll work hard on research to make my prediction be wrong. But I really don't think we will. This was at like an AI conference and we're both like still more junior than we are now. And he had this really strong belief. And, you know, they worked on robotic hands and we're like another step towards AGI. And I'm like, I mean, it was a cool robotics project. They worked on Dota gameplay and OpenAI. And I'm like, that's a cool RL project. And they're like, another step towards AGI. And then, you know, they saw like our prompt engineering paper, which they cited. And that NLP route was a more legit step towards AGI than the previous things. But long story short, we did this bet. And in the bet,”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That domain. Like you can simulate Go or chess, like you can simulate a computer game because it's in the computer and you can play around with it. Obviously, AI is going to solve that at some point. None of those results were that surprising to me, though they, again, amazing marketing and a grazing, like actually doing it, right? That's really hard, but it's not that surprising. But what we can't simulate most of the interesting things in the world, such as a cell. But once you can simulate a cell and in multiple cells and organs and organisms, like all of a sudden AI can try billions of different things on how to cure that cancer, how to cure MS, how to cure all the bacteria and viruses and like all these different things. It will be such a massive unlock to be able to simulate those things with quantum computers and maybe also more and more with normal computers.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's the obvious one that we don't want to see, which is just like all the passwords need to be re-encrypted and changed and all the data that has been leaked but is encrypted might get decrypted. And hence people know what's in some things of the past that they had hacked but couldn't really decipher yet or decrypt. I think on the positive side what I'm really excited about is getting quantum computers to a scale where we can simulate a cell. We can right now like really, really accurately only simulate like a few hundred atoms at best and how they really truly interact with one another. And like neural nets can approximate that there's a lot of cool things where you can hack simulations, but from real first principles, really deeply model physics and chemistry that is complex and eventually biology, like that will be such a massive unlock because in AI, anything you can simulate, AI can solve every problem.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, and like, you know, I think parallelism has helped a ton, like, and NVIDIA shows us that, yeah, we might not double the number of transistors or whatever every 18 months, but like we may have more parallel ones. And then there's still the black horse of quantum, which may, you know, a lot of announcements unclear if they're like how real they all are, but like that will also be a major shift when it finally does happen, but it might still take five, 10, 15 minutes”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest misconception is that we have sort of this bimodal black and white when things are often in some gray in between. Some people think it's going to take off over all the jobs. And then because it's so brilliant, like overnight, like everything will be gone. And then the next night it will kill us all, right? Like it's just like this extreme optimism that then can sometimes also switch into extreme like pessimistic optimism of like, oh, the technology is so good and becomes fully self-aware and conscious that it will then obviously want to kill us all. So there's like the misconception on that side. Then there's the misconception to still like, and I see this in Germany still, there's still people like, you know, two years ago was crypto this year's AI, like maybe it'll just go away. And like that's also a huge misconception that still exists in the world. It's hard for you and I imagine as we live sort of in a bubble, but I see it when I travel.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually don't think they're all going to just die overnight. Like, think about speech recognition. It's very commodity. There's tons of open source speech recognition, like algorithms you can download and so on. There's still several companies that make millions and like tens or even hundreds of millions of revenue doing speech recognition just perfectly. That last little bit. Like you don't just throw like a full feature length movie and make it in this new style with ChatGBT. Companies are going to want to have custom solutions for them. And even that fashion thing, I think there's a space where you take the picture and like it's just integrated in your camera, in your workflow. You can change the skew. You can change the model's hair color and every little pixel is just perfect. So you can put it on a big billboard. I think there will still be like specialized companies that go and do deeper things than you could do if you knew how to use.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, I think AI has gotten so exciting for so many people that the startup world is going back to the basics. Like, you know, just like when there were 100 photo sharing apps and only one Instagram and maybe a Flickr and so on, that no pun intended Flickr, I think we'll see something similar in AI. It just goes back to is your branding good, your marketing, your sales, your distribution. And then, of course, a lot of the technology things, but those get commoditized more and more, just like sharing photos was a fairly commodity capability. But a lot of little subtle details were better for Instagram. Now, that's consumer. In consumer, you usually end up in monopoly or duopoly situations. Enterprise is a very different world.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be, but we have seen some companies now that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars and still died. We're going to see a correction when companies are trading 180x, their ARR and they don't have a real moat and like there's the switching cost as close to zero to go to deep seek or something else. They've seen some retention.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of people are doing it, but we also know now we have customers who are like, okay, we want to know exactly which models are accessible and have these security requirements and so on. And that's where you really can't be like a great consumer company and a great enterprise”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a huge barrier. LMs are garbage in, garbage out to a large degree. So if you have a search model or an index and you ask, what's new with Trump? And that search index brings back pages from like six years ago, the LM will tell you wrong and outdated things about that query. So the search is kind of the often forgotten infrastructure layer for LMs. And so companies are rightfully concerned about privacy and all of that. And that's why we have zero data retention. We have agreements that we don't train any model on company internal data. That's how you get into enterprise.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'm happy for him. So, yeah, there is very little switching costs. The same is true for LLMs in the consumer world, right? None of them are that amazing yet. None of them do enough personalization yet. Now, where there is a lot of switching cost is if you have company internal data or you have unique data assets. How concerned are they?”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he was very, very smart. I really tried to keep him at U.C. com and stuff. He went from intern to, I think, CEO. Yeah. And of course, and so, yeah, brilliant. Why did you”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and Codium, I wish I could have invested in cursor. One of the founders was actually an intern at U.C.com. And I would have loved to invest. But yeah, so and in Codium, I fortunately was able to invest in.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think a lot of teams will be more efficient. We'll be managers of AI. I think all the boring bits of all work. I think one of the ways to think about future of work is one, we'll all become managers of AI. Number two, managing is hard. And so we have to train people to it. What that means is in the future, every time you do a job like a dozen, two dozen times, you're going to be like, wait, why hasn't the AI now taken that over from me? Why do I still have to do this repeatable, boring thing? I personally hate repeatable boring things, so I'm all for it. But that is a mindset shift that schools don't teach yet. And that will take a generation of kids to have to grow up in this mindset.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're also not going to be as good of a vibe coder. Like, there's just certain things like complexity theory. Like, you just say, like, oh, do this sorting for me or do this, you know, like if you don't know how sorting algorithms work and like how fast they could read, like make it faster, make it faster. And then someone's like, there are certain complexity theoretic upper bounds of how fast a sorting algorithm can be. And you just telling it that it'll go to jail if it doesn't do it faster is not going to make it any more any faster. And so it's useful to understand that. You also have seen that even LLMs benefit in their general reasoning skills when they know and have seen programming as training data. And I think that's true for people too.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest problem and biggest worry I have is that the entry level jobs right now are more and more automatable. And so you hopefully have companies that have a long enough time horizon such that they're willing to train people, even though an AI could do the job because they're either cheap enough or like they just have a long-term view on the world. And then by the time they are senior enough, hopefully AI hasn't automated that senior job also, and then they can be in that senior role and then manage all the AI agents because they understand the processes. Turns out if you've never done something, it's much harder to manage someone to do it for you. Same with like vibe coding, right? It's like it's super fun. It's awesome. I just posted this really funny video of this comedian about vibe coding. But if you don't know how to program at all,”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More useful way to spend my time than learning five more languages, which is beautiful for me, but not useful for humanity. And so I do think that will fall away. But programming isn't just about programming itself and being like an IT or being a programmer or a developer or so on. It's also about a different way of thinking. And it's a different way of understanding the world that you're in. And so if you have an understanding of that, then it feels less like magic and you are more empowered to actually contribute to that world. So I think that's important. Even if you want to study law, medicine, chemistry or whatever, you should combine it with computer science because all of these fields are going to change over the next couple of decades.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the same reason why we're speaking English. And like, I could have stayed in Germany and never learned English. And then every time you say something, for a while I would type it in. And then hear it. And then every, you know, two minutes would have like some useful bit of information going back and forth. Or eventually I'm going to have just like a full bobblefish in my ear. And it will translate it hopefully fairly well and get the connotations and maybe capture my voice. And maybe that technology is like fully there in five years or so. So good, so cheap, so prevalent that everyone will just travel with it and everything. I think even then it'll be useful for some people to know some languages. But do we need to translate as much? No, actually in my masters, I was studying Chinese back in Germany. I just fell in love at that time with statistical machine learning pattern recognition and statistics and what we now call AI. And realized that is a”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's similar but different, like because in high school after you finish high school, you can still study for a couple of years. So that's a big difference. Once you're already out of college, it's like it's much harder. But knowing computer science is incredibly important. Like knowing how to program is incredibly important. Why do you”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been an investor in replica many, many years ago. To me, you can find beautiful examples where people just say, look, I used to journal. Now I write into this thing. And sometimes it asks me questions back. And it makes me feel like someone cares. Think about your best friend. If they kept coming into you every single day with all their little problems, you're like, that problem didn't cross my threshold of being relevant enough for you to tell me about it. But some people have that desire to just tell other people about their problems all the time. And very few people have the just time and incapacity and emotional capacity to hear that all the time every day. But so I think it's a perfectly fine use case for people to work through their problems just like they used to write a diary.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can then give to their family, to their kids, and so on. And so I think UBI will take that meaning away. And we're already in a meaning crisis with the technology and society that we have set up for ourselves in many places. And I think that will just exacerbate it.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retraining is hard. I used to be a big fan of UBI and I thought that seems like a fair thing to do. And I think you have to, one, acknowledge that everything falls on some normal distribution. I think that we have to teach kids a drive to want to create something, like to actually have desires to make improvements to the world. In fact, I think one of the biggest civilizationary unlocks would be to all agree that entropy or darkness in the universe is the enemy and that we should spread consciousness into the universe. If we can all agree that's the goal, then we can always be motivated to do more of that, to spread intelligence and intelligent entities into the universe. That would be beautiful. But zooming back in, I think the problem is that while most people complain about their jobs, it does give them meaning. It does give them meaning to be a valuable part of society and to have earned something that they”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So it's actually something that we have shipped internally, and I think it'll come out in a week or two on U.Com, like, to just automate that orchestration completely away. And only the power users who really want to can double click into the interface and then choose which model to use.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and no. It is a software update, but you'd be surprised, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, the adoption is not as fast as you think. It takes people to change their process. It takes them some time. I don't think it'll happen as quickly as people think. There's still, I think, 60% of all adults in the US have never talked to a chat model at all. And that's the US. Like, just go to Europe. I'm sure that is even higher”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they get paid by the hour for those outcomes. And so that is a negative downside that I think it's onto governments to help their people not to block the technology and enforce not using it, but actually use it and use the proceeds and help people to learn new kinds of skills.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Job changes are brutal in the moment. There will add a lot of pressure on social systems. I think long term, I'm an optimist, but short term, you've got to have good social systems and help people with a path in this new AGI future as their jobs change and fall away. The modern day Luddites of like our illustrators, right? Because it used to be that you can charge $500 for an illustration. And if you cared about just seeing illustrations as art and you want to see as much art as possible in the world, you're excited about having AI now create Ghibli and all other kinds of beautiful illustrations. But if that was your life's income and you spend years honing that skill and now that skill is just not worth it anymore, then it's cost five cents or less to make an illustration, you hate the technology, right? And this is understandable. Now, of course, just like the past day Ludites, we all appreciate having a t-shirt and everyone even in Africa can have as many t-shirts as they want and it's very cheap. And we like most humanity likes the outcomes, but most people don't like.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you why certain foods will have a skin, create a skin issue, or change your mood and things like that. And how did it all connect your micro? People literally do poop transplants because we don't understand. And sometimes they work and work magically well and cure actual diseases for people because now they have better gut microbiome. And so I think there's so much complexity and AI is the perfect tool to tackle that kind of complexity because we can now have similar things. We understand how one neuron works, but when you have enough of them, you scale it up enough. All of a sudden you can have a conversation and people think it's a human being on the other side, right? And so AI is a perfect tool. Medicine is the perfect application for that.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But has not yet found a tool to understand complex systems really well. Like we know every neuron and how every single neuron in your brain works just from first principles. You can take one out and see it has all the synapses and you can compare and then you see, okay, there's inputs outputs and this is how it fires. But then when you put a bunch of them together and suddenly you have intelligence, like no one understands sort of these thresholds, these complex systems emerging and having these emergent properties. And why is it when the brain is slightly bigger and has enough neurons and the right setup, now all of a sudden you have true human intelligence versus much less strong animal intelligence, but they can have better visual intelligence, but not language intelligence and all these different things, like these emerging properties, same with the microbiome in our gut. We understand how one bacterium, like what one bacterium does, but then you put them all together, no one can read.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that is one of several chapters in my book are about that. I think it's one of the most exciting part of AI that AI will change in many ways science, I think has been stuck in understanding the micro really, really well”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's still like a lot of hard work and very interesting research and more and more development. I think Facebook, Meta had open sourced some new finger tips also that had some pressure sensors and stuff. And you'd have to incorporate that. I think it's doable now. It's just like it's a lot, a lot of work.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's similar to what we see and what we have seen with radiology, for instance. It's very easy to build one radiology classifier for one thing and make that better than a human. But then there's this very long tail of things. And so you need a lot of money and a lot of resources and a lot of data to see the long tail of all things in radiology before you could actually automate a radiology process fully from end to end and get it fully FDA certified and so on. And in household robotics, you have the same very long tail.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the bull case is at home when it actually the speed doesn't matter, but there's just a whole host of many different tasks. So you can have a Roomba and the Roomba will do one thing better than a humanoid. You can have a dishwasher and we'll do that thing better than a humanoid. But if you now also have like 50 other things, sort my socks and do this and open the door and get a package from outside, put it inside, and like 50 or 100 other little tasks, none of which you actually have to at scale massively every day all the time so the custom robot form factor doesn't make sense. Then I think humanoids can be helpful. And if they're quiet enough.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambiguity and where you have a massive scale of many different tasks in environments that are custom built for people where maybe the speed and efficiency doesn't matter as much and so on. Like just take like even for consumer, right, you have a dishwasher. You don't imagine you could have a humanoid doing the dishes, but it would be so much less efficient than a dishwasher would be. And so maybe humanoids, I love them. And fortunately excitement in the future isn't a zero-sum game. I can love custom made robots. I can still be excited about humanoids as well.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a great question. I think the tricky bit in robotics is that part of why ChatGBT had this amazing moment is that it's so general, right? You can just ask it anything. So the equivalent to the generality of a chatGPT is a humanoid. But the humanoids don't work really well yet. The problem is when robotics, like the cost, right, you only want to build specific types of robots when there's a highly scalable process. And now once there's a highly scalable process, the humanoid form factor is not the most optimal factor, right? Like if you have like a highly scalable process is in the fields and agriculture, you don't want a bunch of humanoid robots hunching over and like weeding. No, you just get a freaking like massive tractor with a bunch of lasers and like thousands of little arms and spray like cannons. And then you just like either zap the weeds away. You don't have them hand plucked by like a humanoid robot, right? And so for almost every process that is highly”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That paper, we did that work at Salesforce, and the mark the science marketing, you realize even science, you think, oh, it's just like someone has a Eureka moment and then because of that, they like become super famous and everyone loves that idea. Science is also a human system and you have to do brand and marketing, like something that DeepMind in London here does incredibly well. Their science marketing is probably the best in the world. And so that paper never quite had its moment in the sun yet.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're just maximizing their own utilities and they're adapting to different taxation schemes and tariffs and subsidies and so on. And you basically could now ask this model, this system, what's the most efficient taxation and subsidization scheme for maximizing disobjective that I'm giving you. And people can disagree on what the objectives are. One reasonable one was productivity multiplied with equality. And then that system could simulate billions and billions of years of taxation and subsidization schemes until you basically would find the optimal brackets and whatnot. And just imagine how many millions of lives were lost to humanity trying to figure those things out. And instead, we could ascertain AI to give us some advice on like what would be the actual best setup if you have certain set of goals. You wouldn't have to try out like a massive tariff change in the world. You could just ask.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two areas where I think almost every person also agrees on the planet that it's not about the jobs but about the outcomes. And that's research and medicine. Most people don't say, I want more PhD students in the world. They just want the cool things that PhD students develop. And most people don't say, I want more jobs in healthcare. They just want cheaper, faster, better healthcare. And so I think those are two beautiful areas that still we're, they haven't had their chat GBT moment. And I'll maybe mention one more, which is AI and economics. I'm writing this book right now. We've had this paper in 2018, I think. It's called The AI Economist. And the field of economics hasn't had their chat GPT moment yet because it's such an old, slow moving field. They don't have archive papers. They don't have conferences where you publish every couple months. And so we actually built this two-level reinforcement learning model where you had an AI economist and you had a bunch of intelligent agents that”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If steam engines get more and more efficient, then we'll need less and less coal, so the price of coal will go down. But what actually happens is you just use steam engines in more and more places. Eventually they could create electricity, they can move steamboats and so on. And you just used it more and more. And so the price of coal actually went up instead. And so I think the analogy here is that yes, AI, like the marginal cost of intelligence keeps going down, but that just means we're going to use it more and more places.”
2025-04-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source