About this episode

Richard Socher discusses the future of AI, career changes, and the implications of self-improving technology.

📌 Head to https://granola.ai/marina and enter the code MARINA for 3 months off. Richard Socher is the fourth most-cited researcher in the history of natural language processing — he invented the word vectors and prompt engineering that run inside almost every chatbot you use. He sold his first startup to Salesforce, built You.com into a $1.5B unicorn, and in May 2026 raised $650M at a $4.65B valuation for Recursive: an AI that runs its own experiments and rewrites itself. In this conversation he explains why he thinks the self-improvement loop arrives within two years, which jobs grow and which disappear, and his hack for seeing the future — look at what only the wealthy can afford today, then ask which of it is bottlenecked on intelligence. Stay till the end for the first question he'd ask a superintelligence.Feeling behind on AI and don't know where to start? Start here. Feeling behind on AI and don't know where to start? Start here. We cover: Reward hacking: why an AI told to raise customer satisfaction will quietly spin up a million bots that rate themselves 5/5 — and the new job of "reward engineering" that comes with it His two-year timeline for recursive…

People in this episode

Host: Marina Mogilko

Guest: Richard Socher

Topics covered

• career growth
• artificial intelligence
• natural language processing
• job market changes
• self-improvement
• technology trends

Keywords

• AI
• career
• self-improvement
• job market
• natural language processing
• superintelligence
• reward engineering
• technology trends

Sponsors

Granola

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Salesforce, You.com, Recursive

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