20VC: Does Value Accrue to Incumbents or Startups in the AI Race, Why Model Size Matters More Than Data Size, Why Artificial General Intelligence is Far Away, Why Carpenters Will Be Paid More Than Software Engineers & Future of Jobs with Richard Socher
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2023
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 150,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.
In Today's Episode with Richard Socher We Discuss:
1. The Decade-Long Journey to Becoming an AI OG:
- How did Richard first make his way into the world of AI over a decade ago?
- What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from working with Marc Benioff?
- How did 5 years at Salesforce impact how he both thinks and operates?
2. Models: Does Size Matter:
- How important is model size? Is data size more important?
- What are the biggest misconceptions people have around models today?
- How does Richard respond to the suggestion that "many startups are wrappers around LLMs"?
- Are hallucinations a feature or a bug?
3. Where Does Value Accrue:
- Where does Richard believe most of the value will accrue; startup or incumbent?
- Which incumbents are best positioned to win? Which are the laggards and behind?
- What do many not see about the startup vs incumbent race in the AI war?
4. Open vs Closed: Which Wins:
- Does Richard favour Yann LeCun's open approach? Or is the world of AI more closed?
- What are the biggest challenges of an open ecosystem?
- What are the nuances that make both challenging?
5. Richard Socher: AMA:
- Why will carpenters be paid more than software engineers in 10 years?
- Why is AGI still way off? Are people too unrealistic?
- How much money does Google make off search every day? Why does that leave them vulnerable?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The future is already here. It's just not equally distributed. |
| 0:03.0 | And I think it will meaningfully change so many jobs. |
| 0:07.0 | The more data there is about a job, the more that job is likely to be automated. |
| 0:12.0 | But at the same time, there are still a ton of jobs or no one collects data. |
| 0:15.0 | What that means is that the tasks that are physical are getting more and more expensive. |
| 0:22.7 | And they're going to become the new bottlenecks. |
| 0:26.9 | And then they're going to slow down overall progress so that the GDP can, like, |
| 0:32.8 | 100x because of AI, it can only increase less than we think it might when we're deep in the bubble. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for the show today as our guest is a true |
| 0:37.7 | AI OG as being widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural |
| 0:43.4 | language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt |
| 0:48.6 | engineering. I'm so excited to welcome Richard Socher, found and CEO of you.com. Previously, Richard served as the |
| 0:55.3 | chief scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO and CTO of AI Startup Metamind, |
| 1:02.1 | which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. And check this out, Richard has over 150,000 citations. |
| 1:09.0 | Bloody hell, that's more than I've done podcasts. But before we dive into the show today, you know all those mind-numbing tedious tasks that seemingly take up half your day. |
| 1:16.6 | Well, Coda is here with their new AI-powered work assistant that helps you and your team not just finish tasks, but make progress. |
| 1:23.6 | So your product team can bring a feature to market faster by using Coda AI to tag |
| 1:29.0 | customer feedback, draft PRDs, suggest target audiences, summarizing product discussions and more. |
| 1:35.0 | Your sales team can engage more customers by bringing in data from sources like Salesforce |
| 1:39.6 | and then use Coda AI to suggest action items, meeting agendas or lead scores and your marketing team can drive an impactful launch with Coda AI to suggest action items, meeting agendas or lead scores, and your marketing team |
| 1:45.7 | can drive an impactful launch with Coda AI summarizing user insights, creating briefs generated |
| 1:51.5 | from notes and writing mock press releases to visualize taglines. With Coda AI, you can reimagine |
| 1:57.5 | your to do list and how you collaborate so you're not only finishing tasks, |
... |
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