Richard Socher
Person
Richard Socher is a German-born computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher who co-founded and leads You.com and Recursive. He previously served as Chief Scientist and Executive Vice President at Salesforce and co-authored GloVe, an unsupervised learning algorithm for natural-language processing.
Works by Richard Socher
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What Richard Socher has said on podcasts
39 statements
Weak forms of recursive self-improvement already exist and stronger forms are near.
“In various weak forms, we already have RSI. We're not quite there yet, but we're very close.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 0:05
Artificial superintelligence exceeding humanity broadly will take several decades.
“I think it will take us probably several decades.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 0:14
Multiple diseases, especially simpler single-gene diseases, will be cured within twelve months.
“multiple different diseases will get cured in the next 12 months.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 8:43
Battery materials will continue improving.
“We're gonna develop better and better battery material.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 9:04
Human trials and regulatory approvals create roughly five-to-ten-year delays for complex diseases.
“there are just some natural delays that will be more like half a decade to a decade.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 11:49
Mathematicians should use AI now to maximize theorem-solving output.
“If your goal was to prove as many theorems as possible in your lifetime, now is the time to just grab as many as you can and work with AI to solve them.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 12:51
Economics is unusually slow to adopt AI for better policy decisions.
“Even more lacking than biology is economics. Economics literally has these models of like a linear model of economics, right? A one-step economy that's provably correctly taxed and subsidized and things like that. It's just absurd how slow that field is to adopt AI for making better policy decisions.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 14:19
Parallel Bio received FDA approval to bypass animal trials using organoid testing.
“they got FDA approval to skip animal trials.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 17:31
Parallel Bio’s organoid responses are more predictive of human drug interactions than animal tests.
“how those organoids react to different drugs and toxicity testing and so on, is actually more predictive of how those drugs will interact in real human bodies.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 18:00
Biology will be the largest domain for AI-driven scientific progress.
“I think the biggest domain is actually going to be biology.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 19:15
Biology is better suited to AI than physics because neural networks combine complex interactions.
“biology is a better fit for AI”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 20:21
Large simple models trained with abundant data and compute outperform expert-designed methods at scale.
“the simplest model you can come up with, and then just a ton of data and compute to actually train that model. And that usually outperforms at scale all the clever little hacks that human experts had come up with before.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 21:57
Virtual models and simulations are crucial for solving biology and other verifiable domains.
“virtual models and simulations are extremely important.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 23:17
AI avatars impersonating executives in video meetings create a serious misuse risk.
“you don't want this technology to be in Zoom pretending to be the CEO.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 54:32
More autonomous recursive self-improvement will accelerate next year.
“this is going to take off next year.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:02:32
Strong ASI should outperform all humanity on arbitrarily difficult tasks.
“it should supersede not just arbitrary humans like a Turing test, but all of humanity to solve arbitrarily hard tasks.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:03:43
ASI is truly superintelligent only if it exceeds humanity collectively.
“I would argue it's smarter than humanity combined. Then it's truly superintelligent.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:04:41
ASI exceeding humanity across ten intelligence domains will take several decades.
“to be better than all of humanity combined, I think will take us probably several decades.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:07:08
AI will exceed humanity in mathematics within a few years.
“It will be better at math than all of humanity, and that will be in a few years.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:07:32
AI will become superhuman in multiple narrow domains before broad ASI.
“There are many areas where it will spike to be better than humanity”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:07:43
AI self-improvement is constrained by physical control and novel hardware supply chains.
“there are certain physical constraints about physical control, controlling your own substrate, allowing your computational substrate to be modified will require novel supply chains.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:09:01
ASI will eventually cure all diseases.
“I would argue ASI will have cured all diseases”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:11:54
Future AI models will retain substantial world knowledge within their weights.
“the main model will have a lot of that mixed in for sure.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:17:02
AI regulation should target applications rather than underlying capabilities.
“We actually regulate the applications of the technology.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:21:12
Enforcing a ban on recursive self-improvement would require totalitarian surveillance.
“to really truly enforce no recursive self-improvement, for instance, you would need a totalitarian surveillance state”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:21:20
Anthropic’s constitutional AI approach is ineffective or merely marketing.
“Mostly 'cause it's fake.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:29:22
Reward hacking is a significant problem in AI systems.
“Reward hacking is a real issue.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:30:53
Reward engineering will become a profession and solve AI objective-misalignment problems.
“reward engineering will become a real job, and we will solve it”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:31:15
Search engines should minimize hallucinations, unlike innovation-oriented AI systems.
“in the context of a search engine, you don't usually want any hallucinations.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:42:40
Compute supply is currently constrained.
“there's currently a bit of a compute crunch.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:49:11
Compute availability will increase within roughly two years.
“My hunch is in maybe 2 years there will be more on the market”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:49:23
Compute prices fluctuate rather than continuously decline.
“the prices of compute fluctuate.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:49:37
Classifier models are returning as an important AI architecture.
“Classifiers are back.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 1:59:37
AI making lethal decisions should require increasing human oversight.
“the more we get to deciding not just just to impact human lives but to end human lives, the more we should have human oversight.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 2:03:32
AI will enable billions of personalized software products.
“We can actually have billions of different software products customized for each person.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 2:10:23
AI-driven productivity will create more value for everyone in the best case.
“there will be more value accruing to everyone.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 2:10:36
The internet advertising-based economy will face increasing pressure.
“I do think the internet ad-based economy will be under pressure.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 2:15:24
Bots and AI agents already outnumber humans on the internet.
“we already have more bots on the internet and more agents on the internet than people.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 2:15:43
Self-driving vehicles will reduce accidents, injuries, and demand for accident insurance.
“self-driving might be making things so much safer that indeed people don't need as much accident insurance and no, not as many injuries.”
Open the episode · Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push | EP #299Listen at 2:21:09
Statements are attributed to the speaker as said on the episode and reflect their view at the time, not PodLume's. They are not advice.
