Richard Socher: Re-Imagining Search

Richard Socher: Re-Imagining Search

Author: Daniel Bashir March 16, 2023 Duration: 1:37:49

In episode 64 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Richard Socher.

Richard is founder and CEO of you.com, a new search engine that lets you personalize your search workflow and eschews tracking and invasive ads. Richard was previously Chief Scientist at Salesforce where he led work on fundamental and applied research, product incubation, CRM search, customer service automation and a cross-product AI platform. He was an adjunct professor at Stanford’s CS department as well as founder and CEO/CTO of MetaMind, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He received his PhD from Stanford’s CS Department in 2014.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (02:20) Richard Socher origin story + time at Metamind, Salesforce (AI Economist, CTRL, ProGen)

* (22:00) Why Richard advocated for deep learning in NLP

* (27:00) Richard’s perspective on language

* (32:20) Is physical grounding and language necessary for intelligence?

* (40:10) Frankfurtian b******t and language model utterances as truth

* (47:00) Lessons from Salesforce Research

* (53:00) Balancing fundamental research with product focus

* (57:30) The AI Economist + how should policymakers account for limitations?

* (1:04:50) you.com, the chatbot wars, and taking on search giants

* (1:13:50) Re-imagining the vision for and components of a search engine

* (1:18:00) The future of generative models in search and the internet

* (1:28:30) Richard’s advice for early-career technologists

* (1:37:00) Outro

Links:

* Richard’s Twitter 

* YouChat by you.com

* Careers at you.com

* Papers mentioned

* Semi-Supervised Recursive Autoencoders for Predicting Sentiment Distributions

* Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality Over a Sentiment Treebank

* Grounded Compositional Semantics for Finding and Describing Images with Sentences

* The AI Economist

* ProGen

* CTRL



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Hosted by Daniel Bashir, The Gradient: Perspectives on AI moves beyond surface-level headlines to explore the intricate machinery and human ideas shaping artificial intelligence. Each episode is built on a foundation of deep research, leading to conversations that are both technically substantive and broadly accessible. You'll hear from researchers, engineers, and philosophers who are actively building and critiquing our technological future, discussing not just how AI systems work, but the larger implications of their integration into society. This isn't about speculative hype; it's a grounded examination of real progress, persistent challenges, and ethical considerations from those on the front lines. The discussions peel back layers on topics like model architecture, policy, and the fundamental science behind the algorithms becoming part of our daily lives. For anyone curious about the substance behind the buzz-whether you have a technical background or are simply keen to understand a defining technology of our age-this podcast offers a crucial and thoughtful resource. Tune in for a consistently detailed and nuanced take that treats artificial intelligence with the complexity it deserves.
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