How You.com plans to fight Google’s search dominance

Founder Richard Socher’s research helped pave the way for today’s AI leaps and bounds

You.com CEO Richard Socher may not be a household name, but if you travel in AI circles, chances are you know who he is. Starting in 2014 when he wrote his influential thesis about natural language processing, he has helped pave the way for today’s headline-grabbing AI technology, a fact that doesn’t escape his notice as he tries to build his next-generation search engine.

He launched MetaMind shortly after that article was published, a startup that Salesforce acquired two years later. In fact, as chief scientist at Salesforce, he helped build the AI ​​layer the company calls Einstein.

After leaving Salesforce, in 2020 he started You.com, a consumer search engine. He’s clearly up for a challenge, but he also recognizes that with his time and his ability to innovate, he has two advantages that allow his company to tear down Google’s search hegemony.

He’s not intimidated by the fact that fellow search engine startup Neeva, launched by two Google veterans, was recently acquired by Snowflake after failing to find a product-market fit. He says his search engine is already much bigger in terms of users than Neeva ever was.

But he also understands that what he is doing is more than theoretical; it’s a business and he needs to look to a future where he’s not just burning money but also raking in it. revenues, have raised a modest $45 million.

We helped get this party started

While AI research has been going on for decades, in 2014 Socher and his colleagues at Stanford helped open the door to today’s breakthroughs with their groundbreaking research. He has continued his research and only published articles in 2020, when he started to put all his efforts into his current company.

As a scientist, he says it was great to see his research put to work in this way. ‘Last week I realized that as a researcher you are a visionary if you are ahead of your time. And you get a lot of credit for people using your ideas later on, and you’re like ‘Oh, wow, we invented word vectors and contextual vectors, and then promptly engineered and the single model for all of NLP and LLMs for Protein DesignSocher told businessroundups.org+.