PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Richard Socher

Also known as Richard Socher S

Richard Socher is a computer scientist whose AI work spans natural language, computer vision, and search. He studied computational linguistics in Leipzig and Saarbrücken, then earned a Stanford PhD for research on recursive deep learning. His recursive neural network work earned an ICML award, and he coauthored the GloVe paper on word representations, which later received the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award. MetaMind built a deep-learning platform for image and text data, and he later led Salesforce research as Chief Scientist. He founded You.com for AI search and now leads Recursive, which works on recursive self-improving AI.

Now at
You.com and Recursive
Works
211
Citations
138,104
h-index
75

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Richard Socher

Timeline

  1. 2006–2014

    From linguistics to deep learning

    He studied computational linguistics in Leipzig in 2006 and Saarbrücken in 2008, then researched artificial neural networks for language processing at Princeton and Stanford. At ICML in 2011, he and his coauthors won the Distinguished Application Paper Award for “Parsing Natural Scenes and Natural Language with Recursive Neural Networks.” In 2014, he completed a Stanford computer science PhD with a dissertation on recursive deep learning for natural language processing and computer vision; Stanford awarded the thesis its Best Computer Science PhD Thesis Award.

  2. 2014

    Making words into vectors

    With Jeffrey Pennington and Christopher Manning, he coauthored GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation, published at EMNLP in 2014.

  3. 2014–2016

    Building MetaMind

    He founded MetaMind in 2014 and led it as CEO/CTO. Its deep-learning platform analyzed, labeled, and made predictions on image and text data. Salesforce acquired the company in April 2016.

  4. 2016–2020

    Leading Salesforce AI research

    After the acquisition, he became Salesforce Chief Scientist and led the company’s research efforts. He left Salesforce in 2020.

  5. 2020

    Starting an AI search company

    After leaving Salesforce, he founded You.com to develop an AI-based search engine.

  6. 2024

    Awards for language work

    At ACL in 2024, GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation was named the Test-of-Time Paper Award winner for 2014. TU Dresden awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work in deep learning and natural language processing.

  7. As of October 2026

    Leading two AI companies

    He is You.com’s co-founder and CEO. He is also Recursive’s co-founder and CEO; the company builds recursive self-improving AI systems for knowledge discovery.

Sources and credits

Photo: World Economic Forum, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 3.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group nlp.stanford.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Dresden AI Pioneer Richard Socher Awarded Honorary Doctorate tu-dresden.de. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Richard Socher, Author - Salesforce salesforce.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. ACL Test-of-Time Papers Award Recipients - Admin Wiki aclweb.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. Richard Socher socher.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. You.com Author | Richard Socher you.com. Checked 14 October 2026.