What happens when AI starts building itself?
Key takeaways
- Richard Socher has been a major figure in AI for some time, best known for founding the early chatbot startup You.com and, before that, his work on Imagenet.
- Socher is joined in the new venture by a cohort of prominent AI researchers, including Peter Norvig and Cresta co-founder Tim Shi.
- This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Richard Socher has been a major figure in AI for some time, best known for founding the early chatbot startup You.com and, before that, his work on Imagenet. Now, he s joining the current generation of research-focused AI startups with Recursive Superintelligence, a San Francisco-based startup that came out of stealth on Wednesday with $650 million in funding.
Socher is joined in the new venture by a cohort of prominent AI researchers, including Peter Norvig and Cresta co-founder Tim Shi. Together, they re working to create a recursively self-improving AI model, one that can autonomously identify its own weaknesses and redesign itself to fix them, without human involvement a long-held holy grail of contemporary AI research.
I spoke with him on Zoom after the launch, digging into Recursive s unique technical approach and why he doesn t think of this new project as a neolab, he informal term for a new generation of AI startups that prioritize research over building products.