‘Why, if I ask a question on the internet, do I still get a list of blue links?’ – you.com co-founder Richard Socher

The age of the search engine is over, and the age of the answer engine is only beginning. That’s according to Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of AI-driven smart assistant platform you.com.

Speaking at Collision in Toronto, Richard (pictured above) said he realised the potential for better search engines during his time as chief scientist at Salesforce.

“It was clear in 2018 that we could have a different search engine. We invented prompt engineering, the idea that you could have a single neural network model that you can just ask any kind of question,” said Richard.

“You can ask all of these questions to one model and prompt that model to then give you different kinds of answers. And so I realized: ‘Well, if I can ask that one kind of question, why, if I ask a question on the internet, do I still get a list of blue links, for the most part?”

“And so in 2020, we started you.com with the goal of moving from search engines to answer engines,” he added.

Richard’s comments come at a time of flux for the tech industry. Numerous companies are vying for dominance in the AI assistant space, while search engines such as Google and Bing have unveiled new features incorporating AI into their respective search functions.

When asked about you.com’s viability in an industry dominated by companies such as Google and Microsoft, Richard replied that he could foresee a synergistic relationship between search engines and answer engines.

“I think from a user perspective, it’s going to be kind of a Venn diagram where there’s a lot of overlap [between search engines and answer engines],” said Richard.

“Some queries you could probably do to both. Then there are some queries that you would never ask a Google engine, like: ‘How do I program this really complex thing?’ … because you wouldn’t be getting back a nice function that you can just copy and paste.” 

Richard continued: “So we will never replace search in a sense that we don’t even need to have a search engine. [But] there will always be some synergies between the two.”

When asked about the potential of being bought out by one of the industry’s big hitters, Richard said: “We’ve launched a bunch of things. [At the] end of 2022, we were the first to really connect the large language model as a search engine and have citations within the answers.”

“And then, you know, three, six months later, Microsoft Bing has it, [and] a lot of others. So it is clear that we are able to out-innovate some of these big players.” 

Richard’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on AI at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

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Useful links

• Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
• Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
• Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
• About Web Summit: about.websummit.com