How Prompt Engineering Inventor Built $1.5B in 3 Years | You.com, Richard Socher

Early Ideas on Neural Networks for NLP and Founding You.com00:00

Had the crazy idea in 2010 to use neural networks for natural language processing, which was very controversial. Many in the field said neural networks never work and won't ever work. Most papers got rejected because people hated neural nets for NLP. MIT and especially Berkeley hated neural networks for NLP. Invented prompt engineering and thought people should get access to it. Felt like someone's got to do it. In 2020 when starting You.com, many said search is dead, nothing you can do.

I don't really generally care about what's popular. I just care about what's meaningful.

Once you love an idea and it makes sense from first principles, you need belief to make it prevail through rejection and keep going.

Hi everyone, I'm Richard Socher. Founder and CEO of You.com and founder and partner at AI Accenture. You.com is AI search infrastructure. To make an LM not hallucinate, need good search infrastructure to inform the LM. People search on Google; AI, LLMs, and agents search on You.com. Companies like OpenAI, Amazon, Alibaba, Telegraph, Windsurf, Harvey use You.com's API infrastructure to make their LLMs up-to-date, accurate, with citations to verify facts.

Amazing to become a unicorn, but feels like what's next?

Originally from Germany. Thought a lot about the meaning of life in high school. Loved natural languages: studied English, French, Chinese, and math. Math and languages intersect in computers using math to understand language. Decided to study linguistic computer science in 2003. Not famous or popular in Germany; niche subject few studied. Dad thought it didn't sound useful.