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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“Again, this is sort of where I think the analogy is the tide is rising, but it's also hot. So from time to time, there are bubbles on top of it. I don't think we're in an AI bubble period. I think intelligence, the fact that the marginal cost of intelligence goes down is the same as the marginal cost of electricity or coal or something going down, but we will just use it more and more. Like a couple years ago, I tweeted and read about this thing called Jevin's Paradox, a couple of like weeks or months ago, some other people have found it also and talk about it a lot, but it is for those who haven't yet seen it. It's a very useful analogy here. So in the first industrial revolution like 1860s or so, Jevins was an economist and he looked into the price of coal. And a lot of the smartest engineers and mines at the time made more and more efficient coal, like steam engines. And so he eventually thought, and a lot of people thought, 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
“Early stage strong technical teams that also have some market insights into a specific vertical, into a specific app. And one of the big verticals that I love so much and think from first principles is the right time to buy right now is in biology too. And so biotech is essentially a perfect storm. Right now the markets are really down public bio. Valuations are much lower for early stage startups, even if they already make good revenue. And the technology is just the perfect tool to really push biology to the next level.”
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, again, if you're just in that narrow niche of infrastructure rather than you own the end user in some capacity, you own some vertical. I have personally stayed away from investing in any Pure LM infrastructure 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
“Much or that much, right? Like these large models have thousands of these hyperparameters, and you need to tune them. And so on the path towards the best model, you usually train hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller models with increasing sizes. So all of these will have cost like several millions of dollars too, or maybe hundreds of thousands, and they're smaller. And so long story short, you put all that together. It was probably closer to 100, 200.”
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 not. Like, I think they had, and that was part of their marketing narrative and part of the other marketing narrative for closed source companies was it's super expensive and they all have sort of underlying reasons of why they pushed the number to be super high or why they pushed the number to be super low. It's also clear that it probably cost them $100, $200 million, but it's still incredibly cheaper than billions of dollars that we're told it would take to train these kinds of models. So the fact that I think they floated like $5 million, that was maybe the very last training run at best if you just count electricity costs or something. But electricity costs can be higher and they fluctuate like buying the GPUs is not included in that. Generally in model development, you train one finally like really good final good model on the path to that. You had to run many what we call ablations or hyperparameter runs where you tune a little bit like should this joint be moving this way?”
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, obviously, one, the fact that it was the first open source model that wasn't just almost up to par, but like in some cases was actually above the closed source models was just a shock. You could almost hear billions of dollars of VC investment evaporate sort of into the ether when that happened. Everyone said that should have been impossible. And there's a narrative of you got to have billions and billions of dollars to be able to even compete. So don't even try. That was the big shock. The timing was great too. Like it was actually for several weeks. It was the absolute best model, which is harder and harder. You know, like this weekend, we have a new Lama 4 model. Why was it launched on a weekend? Maybe they know something we don't. Maybe in like a week or two, there's an even better model. That's going to come out, right? There was some luck involved too. And then just like that fact that it came out of China gave it even more press controversial that that could have happened in China. And of course, 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
“Think one is that personalization, and that's why it's so easy for people to switch around LLMs too. Like DeepSeq overtook almost every other thing other than ChatGPT within a week. Like with almost no proper marketing, like other companies in our space spend millions of dollars every week on marketing, right? And like Deep Sea comes in and what.”
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 it's never been a question of technical strength for Google. It's just a question of classic innovator's dilemma. You make money by showing ads in lists or blue links. So it's hard to give people just a straightforward, useful answer. And they have to play around with that now because there's too much pressure. But in a perfect world for them, not perfect for the end user, they wouldn't want to change that experience. It just prints $500 million a day. Google made this so much money. They didn't know what to do with it. They don't want to pay dividends because then you kind of admit defeat that you can't grow anymore and you don't know. You ran out of ideas. So you have to keep doing something. And they built internet balloons and self-driving cars and just infrastructure, fiber infrastructure. They have so much money. They don't know what they're doing.”
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 consumer use cases, you would assume if Google really wanted to have it, Apple really wanted to have it in theory, they could.”
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 okay to just do it over voice. But even flight booking becomes complicated and changes over time. Let's take something as simple as booking a flight when you're a student and then six months later after you've had a job. Well, once you have a job and you have more money but less time, you'd rather pay extra for direct flight versus a one-stop flight. The AI needs to know all these subtle details about you to get really good. And we're sort of in this valley of disillusionment on a lot of these what I call action agents that go on the web and actually do something for you and take actions that you can't undo and say you buy a ticket that's not refundable or something. There's this valley of disillusionment that we're in right now because the agents just don't know enough yet about the user.”
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 companies right now would love to immediately own the end user and then do all of that below. But my hunch is we've gone through this at u.com too when we're still doing more consumer and we're looking into like basically you wanted to make it easier for users to get things done, right? This is the same idea that now we see with agents. And when you look into it, like I remember this demo where a startup founder was like had his little device and he's like, I want to have a trip to London with my four kids. you know, on this weekend and then one, two, three, and it's done. And I was like, that was definitely BS. Like there's no way that was true. Because when you've, if you've ever booked a trip, there's so many little nuances. And you realize like, as much as I love natural language, natural language is not the single best interface for a lot of different types of answers. Sometimes you want to see a map. Sometimes you want to see a table. Sometimes you want to see a map with a bunch of specific overlays.”
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
“With AI, every person will become a manager. But most people are not used to managing other people or processes. They're used to being individual contributors, doing a specific type of work and doing it well. Now, when you become a manager, you have to learn to distill all your knowledge in a very succinct and unambiguous way to another entity, in this case an agent, right? And so we're helping people essentially train up their own agents. So whatever process they have in their company takes them enough hours. they have they repeat it every couple of weeks or every couple of days like we teach them on how to actually tell that to an ai and then they just have their own agent and they'll just automate that for them”
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 that, or built their own with some APIs. Those are some of the largest customers we've had. And they fail usually for two reasons. One is adoption. They had to pay a thousand seat licenses for OpenAI. And then six months later, they really”
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 that answer depends on the dimension that you want to be best at. I do think it's good to, it's obviously always helpful to be the best. We pride ourselves to be the most accurate. And that is a never ending game. So whenever you say you're the best, you're the best in that moment. And you have to keep working on it. And it does help. It does help with marketing and branding and sales for the most part. I feel like we have still not maxed out our abilities on the marketing side and branding side of things, but at least sales works well enough now that we're really increasing revenue. And that's ultimately what matters.”
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
“A more complex question. And then you just look at how many people have complex questions in their lives. And the more you are a knowledge worker, the more complex questions you have in your life. And very often you have them at work. And that's where like efficiency matters too. And those are some of the many reasons why e.com moved in an 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
“Sort of big waves in consumer applications of bundling and unbundling. For a while, I was hoping we would be in a bundling kind of wave still, but I think it's fairly clear that we're still in a very large wave of unbundling. Consumers are okay going to Yelp for a restaurant review and then going to, if they really care about the weather because they are into flying sports or something going to a specific weather app like Windy, then they go to specific app like Uber eats to like get food delivery or DoorDash or whatever to get their food search if they want to make a very small purchase that's like 20 bucks and they don't care about it they search directly on Amazon young people now look directly on TikTok because they want the food to look good in their Instagram or TikTok or whatever videos and so I think there's a huge unbundling wave and so LMs as part of that unbundling wave of Google LMs will capture whenever you have”
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
“They work 10 to 100x worse. Wow. Search chats. In search, right? You Google at some point found that no matter how bad they make the product, people don't know where else to Google. So they default. Also scary and sad statistic is like 80% of all iPhone users never change a single setting of any kind. Whatever is the default gets used. And that's why like Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to be that default, right? And so it's very hard to move away from that kind of powerful of a lock-in. And then if you realize that, you can say, well, if we need to make more revenue this quarter compared to last quarter, let's just do six ads instead of five ads. And when the organic link results get worse and worse because they're SEO, then everyone knows they're kind of getting terrible. Turns out you make even more money because the product gets worse, but the ads become more and more relevant. And so after doing that for 10 years as an untouchable monopoly, experience suffered.”
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
“Maybe just because ChatGBT owns the consumer market that hard, you have to find a different part of the niche. And we're saying that play out in a variety of different ways. Like we're also focusing more on enterprise. My hunch is other people will follow us into that because that is just like normal consumers again. Either they have a majority very simple questions or they don't want to pay ads in chat are really hard. We actually evaluated that. They work about 10 to 100x worse than search ads. And you have twice the cost about.”
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's why I said if you're in that thin infrastructure layer, and that was an important qualification because OpenAI is a consumer app company. They make their revenue, the vast majority of their revenue from a consumer app called ChatGPT. If you're now just in that API infrastructure layer, it's very different. You have a lot more pressure. Anthropic has a lot more pressure to keep building the best models because Claude is so much smaller in terms of market share for the consumer app. And so that's why that analogy doesn't work. And you're right. consumers once you're really famous and you cross that threshold of just like being well known being the default for a lot of people all the other lm apps companies are almost rounding errors to chat gpt”
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 right. That's where it breaks. It's even worse because the one thing player breaks is software. So you don't have even less of a mode. And with open source, it's even more.”
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 very interesting, but on value, you have to also differentiate between value creation and value capture. I think LLM companies, especially just the pure thin infrastructure layer of LMs, are going to look, I think, more and more like telcos in the sense that it's high CapEx, huge expenditure to build it, especially if you want to build it from scratch. It creates a lot of value in the world. You can't build an Uber app if people don't have internet everywhere, but you don't necessarily capture that value just like Vodafone and T-Mobile and like whoever don't get a cut of Uber working now, right? And so I think that's kind of the mental model I built for LMs.”
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
“Includes a chapter on what I call the upper bounds of intelligence, where I essentially group intelligence into 10 different dimensions or groups of dimensions. And then we can kind of say in this dimension, there is like a fairly low upper bound and we're fairly close to it. For example, object detection and computer vision. It's actually kind of solved. We can classify most objects on the planet now. On the upper bound, that type of intelligence can ever get to is all objects on the planet. And so I think we're already 80-90% there. But in the other bounds, like knowledge. Well, if you include the molecular composition of every planet in the universe as part of knowledge, we are astronomically quite literally and figuratively speaking away from ever having AI reach that upper bound that is basically in the world of physics. And so the state of LMS is very perplexing right 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
“I think AI is kind of this tide that's rising, but on top of that tide, you have a lot of little hype bubbles that come up and down. And in some ways, you can think about when Sam, for instance, says the next generation of models will be as good as a PhD student. The corollary there is that most jobs don't even require a PhD. If you do service for DoorDash or something, like you don't need a PhD to answer service questions. And so LMs are already good enough. They just need to be brought into companies to be actually made useful. And so I think that's sort of one state. And then the future state is, of course, we'll get even better at reasoning. And at some point, there are very, very narrow niches where these models can be as good or better than an expert human. So there's still a lot of room to grow. And so in fact, it's such a confusing state that part of this book I'm writing.”
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
“Chief scientist after four and a half happy years at Salesforce, I started u.com. U.Com basically came from this idea that we have a single model now, a single neural net that can answer all the different kinds of questions. So clearly people on the internet should get better answers than lists of blue links that we get from Google. And so we started with that premise, but eventually realized a lot of people ask fairly simple questions to Google, like what's the weather tomorrow? What's the score of the soccer game? What's the, who's the president of the US? What's the price of the stock? And like on a lot of those questions, you don't really have the opportunity to be 10x better than a Google. You get that answer within one second and that's it. And so we realized eventually the killer app for large language models and complex answers is an enterprise. And so we're now helping companies with answers, agents, and a path towards AGI.”
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
“High level, did my PhD at Stanford and credited for having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing. I was a very controversial idea at the time. It's very obvious in retrospect. It's a sort of story of my life. So brought like word vectors, like improved those massively and sort of build one of the two most popular word vectors. Then we pushed contextual vectors so you can pre-train not just a single word vector, but a whole sentence embedding. And that then became L-mode, which became BERT, which is one of the most cited papers still in the world. And then we invented prompt engineering, which was majorly rejected publicly on open review. And an idea that made no sense to the reviewers. And now in retrospect, it's so obvious, like, no one could have even invented it. It's just like, of course, you can ask questions to one model and no matter the question, you'll get an answer. So I've done a lot of research after PhD, did a startup called Metamind, was acquired by Salesforce, where I became”
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