Richard Socher

Richard Socher is the CEO and founder of You.com, a chat-search assistant. He also plays an active role in the startup ecosystem, investing in and mentoring new companies as a founder and managing partner at AIX Ventures. His career includes significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in the application of neural networks to natural language processing. He developed widely used word vectors, contextual vectors, and is credited with inventing prompt engineering.

Prior to establishing You.com, Richard held the position of Chief Scientist and Executive Vice President at Salesforce. In this role, he oversaw teams dedicated to fundamental and applied research, product incubation, and the development of an AI platform for both unstructured and structured data. Before his tenure at Salesforce, Richard was the CEO and CTO of MetaMind, an AI startup that was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University in 2014 and later served as an adjunct professor in the Computer Science department at Stanford.

Richard’s work is widely cited, with over 180,000 citations. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the best computer science Ph.D. thesis award at Stanford in 2014 and an honorary doctorate from TU Dresden. He was awarded the ICML 2011 best paper award, recognized as a 2016 Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, and received the Microsoft Ph.D. Fellowship. More recently, he was honored with the ACL 2023 test of time award for a paper from 2013, the PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize for ImageNet, and was named among the 2024 WEF Technology pioneers with You.com. In 2023, he was included in Time Magazine’s Time100 AI list. Outside of his professional endeavors, Richard has an interest in paramotor adventures and photography.