The Man Building the Last AI Humans Will Need to Design - The Story
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
What if the fastest path to superintelligence is AI that builds itself? That's the bet Richard Socher is making — and he has the track record to back it up. A double unicorn founder and early investor in eight unicorn companies (including Perplexity and Hugging Face), Richard has spent 15 years building the foundational research that powers modern AI. Now he’s co-founded Recursive with an elite team from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Meta to pursue something more ambitious: a self-improving AI that generates its own scientific breakthroughs — what he calls a "eureka machine."
Richard joins Oz to unpack how recursive superintelligence actually works and why open-ended AI systems could outpace today's giants.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:19.9 | Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Osvaloshan. For those outside the industry, it can feel like AI came out of nowhere and is now taking us all who knows where. |
| 0:29.5 | That's why I wanted to talk to Richard Socher. He spent the last 15 years developing the foundational research and building the infrastructure that powers AI. |
| 0:38.4 | He's also, |
| 0:43.5 | as of recently, a double unicorn founder and CEO of two companies, U.com, and recursive superintelligence. Recursive launched officially in mid-May with the $650 million fundraise |
| 0:50.1 | at a valuation north of $4 billion. And Richard is swinging for the holy grail of technology, |
| 0:57.3 | AI that improves itself, |
| 0:59.2 | what he has called a eureka machine. |
| 1:02.0 | Richard, welcome to tech stuff. |
| 1:03.2 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:04.5 | Eureka machine sounds even better than a thinking machine. |
| 1:07.2 | Doesn't it? |
| 1:08.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:08.3 | What is it? |
| 1:09.3 | Eureka machine, it's not the official term. |
| 1:13.4 | We definitely will use moving forward, but I do think it's a great analogy. |
| 1:19.6 | It's essentially an AI that got very good at inventing scientific advances. |
| 1:27.4 | And we'll start with scientific advances on the science of intelligence |
| 1:32.0 | and artificial intelligence itself, |
| 1:33.6 | but eventually believe that that will lead to a machine that will then get even better |
| 1:38.8 | at doing all kinds of and making all other kinds of inventions, |
... |
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