Socher: Reviewers widely rejected his early prompt engineering paper DecaNLP
Richard Socher · When AI Improves Itself | Richard Socher (Recursive) · Sep 10, 2026 · at 8:55
Recursive CEO Richard Socher discusses how counterintuitive AI paradigms often face initial skepticism from scientific peers.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“My paper where I described prompt engineering, like one neural network that you can just prompt with any kind of questions called Deca NLP, the paper. That paper was wildly, widely rejected by the, like, basically all the reviewers and the area chair and so on as just like completely useless, like too crowded, like made no sense.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Richard Socher
Socher: Existing AI plus more compute can cure diseases and aging
“With existing technology and giving it more data and more compute, we can already cure a lot of diseases. We can already cure many of the aspects of aging. We can already build better fusion like reactors and systems. We can already create new materials.”
Socher: AI scaling will hit logarithmic leveling off in reasoning gains
“I do think we are going to hit a sort of logarithmic kind of leveling off off like how much more data will give us that much more reasoning, right?”
Socher: Nvidia will match AI hardware startups' 100x gains before startups reach scale
“By the time you get that out and it's actually scalable and it can really train it and all the software is ready for it. And I can now go on AWS and spawn up your new hardware, like, Nvidia will also have been a hundred X faster with their latest and greatest …”
Socher: Half of competitors' AI search citations are random, irrelevant links
“Some of our competitors, half of their citations are Independent, random links that have nothing to do with the sentence that they're behind.”