Richard Socher, founder and CEO of You.com and former Chief Scientist at Salesforce, discusses AI research and product execution among tech incumbents.
Disclosure
Socher: Google deranked You.com across all sites, causing immediate traffic drop
“We just got deranked in all our sites from Google and saw like a drop right away.”
Assertion Partly supported
Socher: Bing and Google copied You.com's AI chat features
“Bing and Google copy, you know, what we have launched last late last year with you chat. And you know, they may have worked on it before, like some people, you know, claim, oh, for, I mean, we've also met the prompt engineering in 2018, but like, they've copie…”
Assertion Partly supported
Socher: Chat ads perform up to 100x worse than search ads
“We actually evaluated that they work about 10 to a hundred X worse than search ads and you have. Twice the cost, about.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Socher: An open-source GPT-4 equivalent will arrive by end of 2023
“I predicted that we'll have a GPT-IV equivalent model Before the end of the year, that's open source.”
Assertion Supported
Socher: Calling You.com a thin LLM wrapper is completely false
“But it's something that, you know, some VCs don't appreciate and understand the complexity of, and then they say, oh, like u.com is just a thin wrapper around a large language model, which is very far from the truth.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Socher: Base LLMs will become commoditized like databases
“And I think it won't matter that much which database you use, just like it won't matter that much, which LM you use, but it matters what you do with it, how you tune it what kind of training data you add onto it to fine tune it.”