Why You Need to Rethink Your Career Now | Richard Socher

24:58Like all of these things we can delegate to agents when they get cheaper and cheaper. And then the third one is one of the most exciting ones is personal health care teams. Like if you're really wealthy, you have like your blood drawn all the time. You have customized measurements. You like and you optimize your diet based on everything that you can. If you have like some rare cancer or something, you have researchers that you can pay to help research on all of these things. normal people can't afford that right now. Once we have super intelligence, we'll all be able to afford that. We're already wearing all the trackers, continuous monitoring.

25:29Quick pause. My team and I are celebrating one year of the Silicon Valley Girl podcast. I know the channel has existed for a while, but a year ago I made a decision to focus on amazing conversations with people who are building our future with AI. And for a whole year, we worked to bring you the biggest founders and builders in AI so you can keep up in this era and get inspired. If you love what we're doing, please subscribe and hit the notification bell. It's what helps us bring you the biggest minds of our lifetime. Thank you so much for being here. And I feel like the next frontier is physical.

26:01Because now when you think about billionaires, they have their chef, they have a driver. Do you think world models, once we solve them, we're going to have more robots at home? What is preventing us from having a robot? It might be contrarian, but I think the biggest bottleneck for proper robotics is actually a hardware problem, less so a software problem. Tim Rockteschel, one of our co-founders at Recursive, he built Genie 1, 2, and 3, which is the most sophisticated world model ever. Can fully interact with it, prompt complete worlds into existence, interact in those worlds. There's memory, like you paint a wall, you turn around, it's still painted and all of that.

26:37It hasn't really changed the robotics world as much. Most robotics companies will want to have their own AI and not take some off-the-shelf sort of world model. Also, a lot of these world models spend time creating cute dog videos and stuff. which isn't really that helpful for robotics. But I do think we need to have better mechanics. There's some really interesting research on better muscles that are much more inspired by humans because the problem is when you want the mechanical robot to be very strong and it's also very unsafe and it moves so quickly and you're in the way and then you get hurt.

27:11And so you might want to think about all the hardware, just a tactile feedback when you grab something, right? We have all these sensors in our fingers so we don't crush it like a glass or something like that. And so I think that is the main bottleneck for robotics. And then you're absolutely right. Once robotics happens, then we can all have a maid and someone who does the laundry and all of these things that, again, only wealthy people right now have access to. And then 50 years from now, it's like, wait, why would you do your own laundry? It's like, why would you ride a horse? Of course, you have a car that drives for you.

27:43Or nowadays, things that used to be like a private chauffeur, right? Even that technology of Uber and so on has done it before AI. Demogatized it, yeah. But of course, once we have AI, then the car will self-drive, then it'll get even cheaper to have a chauffeur. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller.

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29:01Business question. You have amazing co-founders. What did you tell them that made them leave their companies and their deep mind, open AI, meta? What was the thing that you told me that made them join you? I think a lot of it comes down to the vision, right? It's such an exciting vision to build recursive self-improvement superintelligence. And many of them have actually come to that same conclusion that that is the next level for AI, but they actually came from different directions. Like Tim Rock, Tessal, and Jeff Boone, for instance, have worked on open-endedness for a while. One really exciting paper is called The Darwin-Gödel Machine.

29:34Four of the five authors of that paper, including Jenny, the first author, and Jeff Boone, the last author, are in the company also. And that paper basically showed how you can have agents that create their own children, agents, child agents, and then they're slightly better. They evolve, you evaluate them on benchmarks. And then if they're better, then you keep going down in this sort of evolutionary process. So they've all thought about various forms of this. I got like Alexei Dostoevsky, who pushed computer vision forward with the vision transformer, one of the most cited papers ever. And so we all, when I told them about this vision, they're all like, this is exactly what I think we need to do too.

30:09And then you also see that the current sort of scaling laws that have given rise to the LMs that we now see are starting to sort of have slowdowns. They're still there. You can get another 10 trillion tokens and maybe you get slightly better accuracy on these models, but you have to spend an exorbitant amount of money to just get a little bit of an improvement. And so clearly to get to the next step function of AI, I think we can replace yet another human process with a learned system. And the human process here is a scientific method. Again, the ideation, implementation, validation of ideas. And that's the sort of meta level that we're now tackling.

30:53For someone who's watching this, who's a beginner entrepreneur, he's like, how do I even meet these people? How did you all meet and what would be your advice to someone who's trying to build an AI? How do they get connected to brilliant minds and convince them to join? Yeah. So this is a little tricky in the sense that we've all known each other. And I don't know if my path is sort of the easiest, which is get into Stanford, do a PhD, spend five years of your life because you just love something that no one else really cares about in the world. It might be easier than going to meetups all the time to sign a co-founder.

31:24Maybe after five years, you're right. Maybe after five years, you may as well have done a PhD. But like, so that was my path. I think nowadays, the barriers of entry are smaller and smaller. You can learn more and more online. And then there is also something to be said about living in the right place. And you can sort of criticize Silicon Valley for some things, but this is the place. If you want to be in AI, you've got to be in Silicon Valley. And you just cannot go to any party here without meeting a bunch of people who are excited about AI. And then the best founding teams are often combinations of strong technical AI expertise with actually interesting industry insights.

32:05We have a company called Ailoka. They work on AI for architecture, automating, getting plans that are really good for real architects to then actually build things. We have companies like Solveya that do commercial due diligence for large deals. And they combine that industry expertise with AI. And there's like thousands of potential businesses in the world. And so that is something that you can do. Move to Silicon Valley, go to meetups and try to find either the right technical person or the right industry expert to combine with your skill set. You have your PhD, you have your honorary PhD from Technician University at Princeton.

32:45For someone who wants to get deep into AI, would you still recommend doing a PhD? or it is just a title at this point? It's a really interesting question, which I struggle with a little bit. I think there are some people who are incredibly self-motivated, smart, and they don't really need any titles, right? So I totally get sort of the idea of you can just drop out of whatever. Generally, it's nice if you got into Stanford or MIT, right? And you sort of have like people know you're smart without having to talk to you. And then you can drop out anyway and do other amazing things. Meet all your co-founders.

33:21Exactly. At the same time, I think a PhD is a very unique opportunity to just spend years of your life being able to get very close to the frontier of human knowledge and then try to just in your little field, just push it forward a little bit. And that's a very rare opportunity. And so if you want to teach that to people, if you want to really push that frontier of knowledge forward, I think PhD is still a very unique opportunity that if you can do it and you're excited and motivated, you should pursue it. Is it necessary? No. I think especially in AI, I personally felt like it wasn't working at all when I started.

33:59Now it's actually working well enough that it's even more impactful to scale it up and bring it into real use cases and real applications. but there's still so many areas of applying AI to things that aren't working at all yet where that I think will be the expertise. And so when people and parents ask me, what should my kids study? I usually recommend them to, yes, know the fundamentals of AI, but find something else that you're really passionate about. Physics, chemistry, biology are like great examples and various many subfields of each that if you're passionate about that, but you combine it with AI, you're going to be that next generation of highly impactful researchers.

34:41Just like you combined computer and linguistics, computer science and linguistics. So you have these brilliant minds in your team. Do you ever encounter any problems that you think you won't be solving as a team? Because this is something that should be solved by the government. So you mentioned goals of AI. How does it decide which goal to pursue? In the future, where do you think, who's going to be responsible for that? So, yeah, just to be clear, like this sort of goal pursuing or goal selecting idea is something that no company is working on. And partially that's OK, because no company wants to spend billions of dollars on AI.

35:18And then you say, all right, now go do these things. And it will say, no, I'd rather just explore like the solar system. Goodbye. Right. That no one wants to spend billions of dollars on that. So that's just an example of something that that there could be made a lot more progress in. But somebody has to be thinking about this. Like where AI is directing itself and how it's optimizing for. So I think for the foreseeable future, people will decide. Like even in recursive self-improvement superintelligence, you give it some high level goals and you give it environments and sort of end states that you would like it to get to.

35:54And then it will find a way to get to those end states. And so I think there is a role for government in a lot of different places. I think in general, as you have more and more abundance and more and more capabilities, it is very helpful for more people to benefit from that. So I think you can actually, and we've seen this in previous industrial revolutions, that at some point there was enough wealth that you can tax people differently and then distribute that wealth and bring healthcare systems into countries, that you bring public education that's free for everyone into it. And countries like Germany have done this.

36:34You have free education all the way to the PhD because the German government knows that the more education you have, the more money you'll make and hence the more taxes they can get later. And so I think we'll see similar things from governments as I think there are labor displacements. It can make sense, similar to COVID, to have government relief, to have unemployment benefits, especially for jobs that are impacted by AI. Unfortunately, sometimes I see Europe kind of wanting to prevent the progress instead of using the progress to have a bigger pie and then distribute it better. and so that's kind of unfortunate in some ways but in a lot of places it makes sense for the government to regulate AI as it pertains to specific industries.

37:18I think the problem is when you try to sort of regulate intelligence, it's not a good idea. It's like regulating the internet because there can be bad content on the internet. You're just like, let's make the internet slower and not allow big hard drives because then you could store less illegal content on those hard drives. It doesn't make sense. And AI already is and should be regulated when it comes to self-driving cars. You can't just try your startup and drive on the highway and without any tests and regulations. You already have the FDA where AI applied to medical procedures should be regulated.

37:50I don't want an AI surgeon to just try some reinforcement learning while doing neurosurgery on my brain. And so, yes, regulate AI as it really impacts people and gets applied in certain industries. But don't try to say, oh, you have too many parameters. That's like saying your hard drive is too big. And maybe because there can be illegal internet content, you shouldn't have this big hard drive. That part doesn't make sense. So you mentioned no one's working on goals. Is there anything else you think people should be working on and you as investor would invest in? Personally, I love AI for tech bio and applications of it.

38:26I think there's still so much more that we can do. I think what calculus was for physics, AI is for biology. And that's like a new kind of language, a new way of thinking about very complex systems. The truth is that there are a lot of systems in our body, like the brain or our microbiome, that are so complex, there's no beautiful single short physics equation, like a Newton kind of law of gravity or something like that. It's all very complex interactions, non-convex, weird interactions, and so that then come out to have very interesting end states. And so I think it will make sense for us to use AI to cure more and more diseases.

39:08And something we're investing in quite heavily, the biomarkets are down too, because a lot of drugs and a lot of drug companies have to go into the public market. Then they fail because the drug didn't work, but it failed after they already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it. And then people had some liver toxicity problem, even though it kind of worked, but it also destroyed your liver. And so they didn't somehow predict that in the drug development process. And then the company failed, the drug fails instead. That what I think will happen is AI is going to get better and better at making those predictions and knowing, oh, this will be bad for your liver.

39:42But, you know, you should modify that molecule. And there's a company that invested in called Ignoda Labs. They actually take failed drugs, modify them a little bit, and then bring them right back into stage two FDA trials with much, much faster speed. And those are all examples of things where ICI will have a massive impact. And I think we'll also hopefully be covered more by the press, right? Right now, the press loves negative stories. And you have to really seek out the right influencers, the right accounts and so on, if you want to hear optimistic, constructively optimistic or positive science news and breakthroughs.

40:17But you don't really see that in your normal day-to-day news. Yeah, it's just the sentiment. I feel like in the past few months, we're getting more and more, like the society is getting split into two parts. And there's something that you mentioned about jobs that I really like. There are certain stages in your job and how you interact with AI. When you're a knowledge worker and it increases your productivity, you get excited. But if you're an illustrator and then it just takes your job, of course, you have this negative sentiment. What do you think is the next market where people will feel this risk from AI?

40:51I actually don't think there will be a whole lot where you can actually, like ways to predict this is how much data is there fully digitized with, you know, sort of all the labels that you need. So basically, illustrations was a particularly tough example because there are millions and millions of them on the internet. And often, it says exactly what you're seeing in the text and the label and the caption right around the image. So you know the input and you know the output. And then you can exactly have sheer unlimited training data for that. And so that's why that was a particularly tough example.

41:32A lot of other industries actually takes a lot longer. Like companies don't have like billions of service call interactions. So to just automate that right away, each company has their own, but no company wants to share that with any other company. Right. And if you're in sort of the CRM world, you cannot train a one global model like you can as a consumer company. And so I think in consumer search, we see a lot of changes already, but enterprise is usually a lot slower because you don't have as much training data. I think in research and programming, we'll see a lot of changes, but not necessarily negative changes.

42:09I think we'll all just become more and more like program directors of the National Science Foundation, rather than sort of individual researchers like pipetting instead of having robots do that for us. But also the argument, I'm thinking about illustrators, the argument is that your work becomes even more precious if it's not AI generated. And if there is a way to tell if it's not AI generated like a marker, then you can charge more. because it's human yeah i think like humans will always want to find new niches and if there's a lot of automation then there will also be a new counter movement to that where it's all about handcrafted artisanal this and that right people already don't like some people say i want to have a handcrafted bowl uh that you know of ceramic where i see sort of the human touch and the imperfections yeah imperfections exactly and now when i'm writing my emails and i see my typos i'm like, actually, I will leave this.

43:02People know that it's real. Yeah, exactly. Because this is this human touch. Can you give advice to people? You mentioned workers who work by hours. Like, there are two ways that I'm thinking about them. One, they can start building their own software and just optimize their work and still charge the same rates. Because honestly, as someone who pays by hours to my editors, for example, I really don't care how much it takes you. Like you can, if you build a software that just edits it for you, that's perfect. Yeah. But also, So you mentioned that companies will use that data to train their own AI to replace those workers because there's no obligation.

43:34What would you tell to people who are working by hours? How can they keep up with what's happening? We'll see something similar to previous sort of technological changes where if you said like, oh, I'm not so good with this computer thing. You're just not in a job anymore, in a knowledge job, right? And be like, I'm not so good with this whole email. Can you print my emails out, right? You just can't say those things anymore if you want to have a tech job or a knowledge job. And I think a similar thing will happen in a few years where you're just like, I'm not so good with this agent delegation thing.

44:09That will sound as clowny as saying, I'm not so good with this computer thing. And so you're going to have to adapt. And the people that do adapt will become way, way more productive and then actually more desirable. And so I think that will be true on an individual level, on a company level, and on a whole sort of country level. The countries that embrace this will just run away in intelligence and productivity and hence outperform the ones that don't. And so even for entry-level jobs, I think there are companies that need to have this new sort of tech-forward generation that knows how to use these tools because maybe they already started using them in college, right?

44:53Yeah. Sometimes to cheat, sometimes to learn more efficiently. And in many ways, we see this in Go, for instance. After AlphaGo came out, Go players got a lot better. chess players are got have gotten a lot better also and so programmers will be more productive and people like everyone who embraces this deeply will become more productive and better at their craft if they really sort of consciously use it versus just like using it to like throw away certain tasks and then not think about it anymore and so my hunch is even for entry-level jobs if you really got good at using these tools you can bring that into companies and be a highly sought after and for YouTube.

45:34Give them a productivity tip as a PhD who's building something in AI. What's the best thing that's working for you? In terms of productivity, I mean, for me, a lot of things are around like learning and understanding things. And recently, I wanted to understand some very interesting new muscle fibers. And they had some dielectric liquids in and just like all these interesting concepts that I hadn't sort of thought about before. And with AI, like my productivity hack is just like you can learn so much faster with AI because you're like, I don't know this concept. Explain it to me like I'm five.

46:12Okay, actually I'm not five. Explain it to me like I'm 10 or like now explain it to me like I have a PhD. Actually this concept now, explain that one because I didn't know that. Like, and so you can kind of interact with this and learn much more quickly. What do you use for it for learning? What's your favorite tool? You.com. Like we built the whole thing and we're the first to bring sort of really the internet like search engines together with an LM. And so it's still very good. It's not that popular. And as a company, we focused mostly on bringing the APIs to other LMs, but it still works really well.

46:45I have a couple of last questions. So imagine we reached super intelligence today. What would be your first question to that super intelligence? How to cure cancer. Like, is that the problem that you want to see solved in your lifetime? Is that number one? I think it's definitely high up there. I think in some ways, you know, obviously, like cancer is actually lots of different cancers. And some cancers are like less bad than others. And in some cases, you can cut out like cut it out really quickly. Other cases, like really hard. And so it's a complex disease. I think it's indicative of a disease that will eventually, you know, it's either like heart disease, you know, inflammation or cancer.

47:22or like a few things that get us, get all of us at some point. And I think as we chop away at more and more of those, just like we've done with like HIV used to be like a complete death sentence. And now it's like, not like just an inconvenience, but like you can live with it for a very long time. I think technological progress will speed that up. And eventually it's going to be like, well, what's going to get us all? It's aging, right? And then aging is a super complex process. is different in every one of our tissues and organs and so on. And so I think that will be another really interesting one.

47:56It might actually come in just the right time as almost every really wealthy country doesn't have enough babies anymore to even stay and not shrink as they at the current levels of population. I think those biological questions and medical questions will be very powerful. The reason why we don't work on it directly is that the iterations in it are very slow. And so you only want to ask to experiment on things in the physical world after you get really, really good at improving your intelligence in the digital world. We're still figuring that out for biology, right? Right. What gives people meaning in 2035?

48:34I think some things will change and some things will not change. I think people will continue to get meaning from being really good at something, developing a really deep skill. Even if AI is better? i think even it's better look at chess yeah yeah i can play way better chess but there have never been more chess players in the world uh than there are now uh same with go same with programming even math i think math mathematicians will get better and better now that they have tools we're like oh this weird idea just run like a billion ways to solve these things and then like maybe it works maybe won't you like okay that would have taken me like two years uh to like do manually now i just like figured out in like two days and i can think about something else like i think we're all going to improve our crafts.

49:19And so I think that will continue to be a thing. I think social validation from others will continue to be something that people care about. And when you walk along some promenade or some shopping mall, you look at the different stores. Not every one of those stores will be impacted by AI. As much as we're thinking about AI in Silicon Valley all the time there are things like luxury handbags not something i understand i don't really get it but like you know an ai like a super intelligence will not change uh sort of the fact that some women like the status symbol of carrying a ten thousand dollar handbag around and so like i think that will happen travel people still want to see the pyramids and maybe even more since we'll have more time exactly 100 and then i think a big one also is entertainment like Like no one wants to see an AI robot like shoot some soccer or football like across the field in like light, you know, Mac 5 like speed.

50:17Like that doesn't make no one's going to watch that. People will still want to see other people competing against each other. So sports and entertainment will continue to rise. I think the power of brands will still be big. I think for software, even there are some aspects of software that are not immune to AI, but like sort of orthogonal vectors like network effects and sort of multi-sided marketplaces. Like, yes, an AI could build the empty app of an Instagram, like probably now very quickly. But AI will not create the network effect of having millions of people post their stuff on Instagram, right?

50:54So as excited as I am about AI, I think some of the people would think, oh, it's just going to be an exponential and then no one will catch up and then one company will dominate everything. I think those fears, both in the positive and the negative, are overblown also. Is there a problem that you're thinking about that other people are not thinking about enough? Personally, I think the search infrastructure layer is an underappreciated, important infrastructure layer of AI. You cannot algorithmically train large language models every five minutes something happens in the world. And so we provide sort of search results for news and other things to AI.

51:34And I think that's underexplored. And the other one, of course, though it's not as underexplored as I would have thought maybe when we started talking to all our co-founders, is recursive self-improvement. In many ways, as a researcher in the past, I felt like if you're right, but ahead of your time, eventually you're called a visionary. If you're a startup founder and you're ahead of your time, your company is dead and no one cares, right? So you have to be right at the right time. So you have to be both. Exactly. So you pick the right title when you see your idea working or not. That's right.

52:09So in some sense, like maybe it's a good thing. Like recursive self-improvement, A lot of people are realizing AI is code, AI can code. We should try to make that work. And at the same time, we're showing like we now have internal results that are better than anyone else in the world across some very important parts of the stack. And we're going to start to release those in the next company. And you're building both of these companies. I don't know how you're doing that. Both billion dollars of valuation. Congratulations on that. And thank you so much. That was a very deep, amazing conversation.

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