Agent orchestration is so two-years ago
Ryan welcomes Saahil Jain, CTO of You.com, to discuss why building agents with a 2024 mindset is a mistake as modern models improve at long-horizon tasks, why heavy orchestration layers can hurt model performance more than help it, and why the 2026 competitive edge actually comes from information retrieval and unique data paired with end-to-end evaluation.
Episode notes:
You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity engine helping enterprises find information, create content, and automate complex tasks using web search APIs, multi-model AI access, and agentic intelligence.
Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn or reach out to him at saahil@you.com.
Today’s shoutout goes to user knittl for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Remove all null values.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The Man Building the Last AI Humans Will Need to Design - The Story
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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Part Two - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between
Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is the second part of my interview with Bryan McCann, the CTO at you.com. If you haven't listened to Part One, I'd encourage you to go back, as it provides crucial context for our continued discussion. In this episode, we dive into how you can think about relating to and integrating the massive changes that AI is bringing to your job, whether you are a software engineer, manager, director, or product professional. Bryan and I discuss his interests beyond research, including art and organizational design.
Explore the two primary paths for developers in the long run: specializing as managers of AI tools (like a product manager with engineering insight) or striving to be better than AI at building better versions of AI itself (the "neurosurgeon" type).
Understand why refining your intuitions about what should be built becomes increasingly crucial as automation makes execution easier.
Examine how conceptual biases often become the bottleneck when interacting with powerful AI tools, such as focusing on very narrow tasks for a broad tool.
Learn how to approach AI failures: treat a failed output as an opportunity to dig in and figure out why, perhaps by asking the AI to write a better prompt or identifying a fundamental missing capability that could become a great startup idea.
Conceptualize AI as the earliest versions of magic, where the manipulation of symbols (like embeddings) allows us to extend our influence into the world in a flexible and powerful way.
Discover principles of organizational design by studying how neural networks learn, focusing on strong information flow, skip connections, and aligning with the objective.
Consider the idea that the next phase of human development might involve emulating AI’s learning mechanisms (rather than expecting AI to become more human-like) to unlock the next phase of humanity and continue our search for meaning.
Hear Bryan’s final piece of advice for listeners: focus on learning and working on things you are passionate about that will have the highest possible impact.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
Part One - Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, on AI, Engineering, Art, and Everything In Between
Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. It's been quite a while since I've had a guest on the show. Today, I'm joined by Bryan McCann, CTO at you.com. We dive into a wide-ranging discussion, exploring the philosophical origins of his career—from studying meaning and language to working in very early AI research. This discussion is less advice-heavy and more focused on kind of theory and discussion. I hope this is insightful for you and helpful as you crystallize your own philosophies on these subjects.
Explore the philosophical journey that led Bryan McCann from being a philosophy major interested in meaning to pioneering early AI research. Bryan views his current work as an extension of those original philosophical questions.
Discover how Bryan shifted from hitting a dead end in "armchair philosophy" to using computational tools to study language and try to make machines that could create meaning.
Understand why Bryan believes that meaning, in the sense he originally sought it, is an innately human thing, tied to purpose and the narratives we use to shape our sense of reality.
Discuss the profound realization that AI breakthroughs might be akin to discovering electricity, suggesting we are tapping into a fundamental framework of meaning or connection that has always existed.
Examine the concept of super intelligence and the "flywheel effect," where AI accelerates research and development, building better versions of itself and potentially surpassing the classic anthropomorphic vision of machine intelligence.
Explore Bryan’s other interests, including organizations, people, and art, which he sees as continuing the uniquely human search for meaning.
Consider the idea that humanity's constant need to differentiate itself from machines may simply be a mechanism for survival, enabling our continued dominance.
📮 Ask a Question
If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..
📮 Join the Discord
If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.
🧡 Leave a Review
If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.
20VC: Foundation Models: Who Wins & Who Loses | How Economies and Labour Markets Need to Change in a World of AI | China vs the US in an AI Race: What You Need to Know | Rich Socher, Founder @ You.com
Rich 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 the AI startup MetaMind, which Salesforce acquired in 2016. He is widely recognised 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 We Discuss:
04:10 Winners & Losers: OpenAI, Gemini, Claude
08:59 How Partnerships Could Decide the Winners in AI
12:42 China vs US: Who Wins the War for AI
25:50 How Society and Economics Needs to Change in a World of AI
34:04 What Jobs Will Be Replaced, What Will Not
36:04 How Europe Needs to Change It's Approach to AI
41:06 How AI Will Change Health and Longevity
43:10 AI in Consumer and Enterprise Markets
49:30 Quantum Computing and AI Misconceptions
56:57 Longevity, Personal Reflections, and Future Outlook
Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile's Regulation A+ Offering. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities. DealMaker Securities LLC, a registered broker-dealer, and member of FINRA | SIPC, located at 105 Maxess Road, Suite 124, Melville, NY 11747, is the Intermediary for this offering and is not an affiliate of or connected with the Issuer. Please check our background on FINRA's BrokerCheck.
835: AI Systems as Productivity Engines, with You.com’s Bryan McCann
AI systems are evolving rapidly, and in this episode, Bryan McCann, CTO of You.com, explains You.com’s unique approach to search, the impact of AI-driven research, and the game-changing potential of AI agents. With a background in natural language processing and philosophy, Bryan joins Jon Krohn to share a fresh perspective on where AI is headed and what it means for the future of work and scientific discovery.
Interested in sponsoring a SuperDataScience Podcast episode? Email natalie@superdatascience.com for sponsorship information.
In this episode you will learn:
(03:55) How You.com’s “do engine” approach connects users to multiple language models
(11:34) How AI systems at You.com generate optimized, intent-driven queries for better results
(28:39) You.com’s focus on automated workflows sets it apart from other platforms
(31:31) AI agents in You.com, with Bryan predicting they’ll outnumber people by 2025
(41:49) Bryan’s path to unified AI models that can perform diverse tasks
(50:40) Early experiments with alignment in AI that influenced modern transformers
(01:04:45) Bryan’s research on controllable text generation
(01:11:27) Language models applied to protein generation, linking text and biology sequences
Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/835
Amazing Answers: Richard Socher on how You.com is Reimagining Search with AI
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Richard Socher, CEO and Founder of You.com, a personalized AI search assistant. They discuss the rise of the AI chatbot paradigm and how that's changed the game for search, You.com's various modes, with particular emphasis on Genius mode and above all Research mode, and much more. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://brave.com/api
LINKS:
- You.com: https://you.com/
-Richard Socher's site: https://www.socher.org/
SPONSORS:
The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://brave.com/api
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off www.omneky.com
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X/SOCIAL:
@labenz
@RichardSocher (Richard)
@YouSearchEngine
@CogRev_Podcast
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Preview
(01:38) Interview with Richard Socher: AI pioneer
(02:26) Exploring the You.com product
(02:55) The AI Bundle
(05:23) Richard Socher's journey in deep learning
(16:43) You.com comparison to competitors
(31:16) The future of AI search engines
(41:38) The changing landscape of search engines
(41:44) The impact of chatbots and AI on search
(42:16) How the market will shape up
(43:33) The power of open source
(01:02:32) The role of AI in advancing science
(51:42) The future of AI: philosophical and practical considerations
(55:06) The future of AI: risks and regulations
(01:11:07) The future of AI: agency and emergence
(01:26:57) The future of AI: retrieval, memory, and online learning
This show is produced by Turpentine: a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more, covering technology, business, and culture — all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We’re launching new shows every week, and we’re looking for industry-leading sponsors — if you think that might be you and your company, email us at erik@turpentine.co.
The Power of AI in Search with You.com's Richard Socher
In the latest episode of Gradient Dissent, Richard Socher, CEO of You.com, shares his insights on the power of AI in search. The episode focuses on how advanced language models like GPT-4 are transforming search engines and changing the way we interact with digital platforms. The discussion covers the practical applications and challenges of integrating AI into search functionality, as well as the ethical considerations and future implications of AI in our digital lives. Join us for an enlightening conversation on how AI and you.com are reshaping how we access and interact with information online.
*Subscribe to Weights & Biases* → https://bit.ly/45BCkYz
Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction to Gradient Dissent Podcast
00:48 - Richard Socher’s Journey: From Linguistic Computer Science to AI
06:42 - The Genesis and Evolution of MetaMind
13:30 - Exploring You.com's Approach to Enhanced Search
18:15 - Demonstrating You.com's AI in Mortgage Calculations
24:10 - The Power of AI in Search: A Deep Dive with You.com
30:25 - Security Measures in Running AI-Generated Code
35:50 - Building a Robust and Secure AI Tech Stack
42:33 - The Role of AI in Automating and Transforming Digital Work
48:50 - Discussing Ethical Considerations and the Societal Impact of AI
55:15 - Envisioning the Future of AI in Daily Life and Work
01:02:00 - Reflecting on the Evolution of AI and Its Future Prospects
01:05:00 - Closing Remarks and Podcast Wrap-Up
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardsocher/
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20VC: The Biggest AI Leaders on What Matters More; Model Size or Data Size & Where Does The Value in AI Accrue; to Startups or to Incumbents
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of You.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce.
Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research.
Alex Lebrun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nabla, an AI assistant for doctors. Prior to Nabla, he led engineering at Facebook AI Research. Alex founded Wit.ai, acquired by Facebook in 2015.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner @ Theory Ventures, just announced last week, Theory is a $230M fund that invests $1-25m in early-stage companies that leverage technology discontinuities into go-to-market advantages.
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve "Software 3.0" companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock where she made investments in the likes of Figma, Coda and Neeva.
Emad Mostaque is the Co-Founder and CEO @ StabilityAI, the parent company of Stable Diffusion. Stability are building the foundation to activate humanity's potential. To date, Emad has raised over $110M with Stability with the latest round reportedly pricing the company at $4BN.
Clem Delangue is the Co-Founder and CEO @ Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. To date, Clem has raised over $160M from the likes of Sequoia, Coatue, Addition and Lux Capital to name a few.
Cris Valenzuela is the CEO and co-founder of Runway, the company that trains and builds generative AI models for content creation. To date, Cris has raised over $285M for the company from the likes of Lux Capital, Felicis, Coatue, Amplify, and Nvidia to name a few.
Noam Shazeer is the co-founder and CEO of Character.AI. A renowned computer scientist and researcher, Shazeer is one of the foremost experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP).
The Two Most Pressing Questions in AI:
What matters more the size of the model or the size of the data?
Where does the value accrue in the next 5-10 years; to startups or to incumbents?
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
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?
Richard Socher of You.com: the David taking on the "Search" Goliath Google
Richard Socher from You.com (and before that, Stanford, MetaMind, Salesforce) joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss the future of search, LLMs, AGI, You.com, Metamind, AIX Ventures.
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AI search at You.com
Neural search and chat-based search are all the rage right now. However, You.com has been innovating in these topics long before ChatGPT. In this episode, Bryan McCann from You.com shares insights related to our mental model of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions and practical tips related to integrating LLMs into production systems.
Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Featuring:
Bryan McCann – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
You.com
Open Platform for developers
Join the You.com Discord server
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
Engineering an ML-Powered Developer-First Search Engine with Richard Socher - #582
Today we’re joined by Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com. In our conversation with Richard, we explore the inspiration and motivation behind the You.com search engine, and how it differs from the traditional google search engine experience. We discuss some of the various ways that machine learning is used across the platform including how they surface relevant search results and some of the recent additions like code completion and a text generator that can write complete essays and blog posts. Finally, we talk through some of the projects we covered in our last conversation with Richard, namely his work on Salesforce’s AI Economist project.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/582
Richard Socher — The Challenges of Making ML Work in the Real World
Richard Socher, ex-Chief Scientist at Salesforce, joins us to talk about The AI Economist, NLP protein generation and biggest challenge in making ML work in the real world.
Richard Socher was the Chief scientist (EVP) at Salesforce where he lead teams working on fundamental research(einstein.ai/), applied research, product incubation, CRM search, customer service automation and a cross-product AI platform for unstructured and structured data. Previously, he was an adjunct professor at Stanford’s computer science department and the founder and CEO/CTO of MetaMind(www.metamind.io/) which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. In 2014, he got my PhD in the [CS Department](www.cs.stanford.edu/) at Stanford. He likes paramotoring and water adventures, traveling and photography. More info:
- Forbes article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2017/05/01/emerging-artificial-intelligence-ai-leaders-richard-socher-salesforce/) with more info about Richard's bio.
- CS224n - NLP with Deep Learning(http://cs224n.stanford.edu/) the class Richard used to teach.
- TEDx talk(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cmx7V4oIR8) about where AI is today and where it's going.
Research:
Google Scholar Link(https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FaOcyfMAAAAJ&hl=en)
The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policies
Arxiv link(https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13332), blog(https://blog.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist/), short video(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iQUcGyQhdA), Q&A(https://salesforce.com/company/news-press/stories/2020/4/salesforce-ai-economist/), Press: VentureBeat(https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/29/salesforces-ai-economist-taps-reinforcement-learning-to-generate-optimal-tax-policies/), TechCrunch(https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/29/salesforce-researchers-are-working-on-an-ai-economist-for-more-equitable-tax-policy/)
ProGen: Language Modeling for Protein Generation:
bioRxiv link(https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.07.982272v2), [blog](https://blog.einstein.ai/progen/) ]
Dye-sensitized solar cells under ambient light powering machine learning: towards autonomous smart sensors for the internet of things
Issue11, (**Chemical Science 2020**). paper link(https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/sc/c9sc06145b#!divAbstract)
CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation:
Arxiv link(https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05858), code pre-trained and fine-tuning(https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl), blog(https://blog.einstein.ai/introducing-a-conditional-transformer-language-model-for-controllable-generation/)
Genie: a generator of natural language semantic parsers for virtual assistant commands:
PLDI 2019 pdf link(https://almond-static.stanford.edu/papers/genie-pldi19.pdf), https://almond.stanford.edu
Topics Covered:
0:00 intro
0:42 the AI economist
7:08 the objective function and Gini Coefficient
12:13 on growing up in Eastern Germany and cultural differences
15:02 Language models for protein generation (ProGen)
27:53 CTRL: conditional transformer language model for controllable generation
37:52 Businesses vs Academia
40:00 What ML applications are important to salesforce
44:57 an underrated aspect of machine learning
48:13 Biggest challenge in making ML work in the real world
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Language Modeling and Protein Generation at Salesforce with Richard Socher - #372
Today we’re joined Richard Socher, Chief Scientist and Executive VP at Salesforce. Richard and his team have published quite a few great projects lately, including CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation, and ProGen, an AI Protein Generator, both of which we cover in-depth in this conversation. We also explore the balancing act between investments, product requirement research and otherwise at a large product-focused company like Salesforce.
