Richard Socher (born 1983 in Dresden, Saxony, Germany) is a German-born computer scientist focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) research who earned a Ph.D. in computer science and attended the University of Leipzig, Saarland University, and Stanford University. He is the co-founder and CEO of You.com, an AI search infrastructure company, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Recursive Superintelligence, a company pursuing recursive self-improvement.^[9,8] He is also a co-founder and investment partner of AIX Ventures, an AI venture capital firm.^[6] Previously, he was a researcher for the visual database ImageNet, and in 2014, he co-authored GloVe, an unsupervised learning algorithm that embeds words in multi-dimensional vectors.^[23]

Socher was born in 1983 in Dresden, Saxony, in Germany.^[11,10] He earned degrees from the University of Leipzig and Saarland University before completing his PhD in computer science at Stanford University in 2014.^[12,22] In 2009, Fei-Fei Li and a team of researchers, including Socher, developed ImageNet.^[15] The large visual database is designed for use in visual object recognition software research, and hand-annotates images to indicate what objects are pictured and in at least one million of the images, bounding boxes are also provided.^[18,16] ImageNet contains more than 20,000 categories, with a typical category, such as "balloon" or "strawberry", consisting of several hundred images.^[20,19] The database of annotations of third-party image URLs is freely available directly from ImageNet, though the actual images are not owned by ImageNet.^[21]

In 2014, three co-authors, including Socher, launched GloVe, an open-source, unsupervised learning algorithm that embeds words in multi-dimensional vectors. GloVe sought to compete with Word2Vec, with Socher and his co-authors arguing that "[f]or the same corpus, vocabulary, window size, and training time, GloVe consistently outperforms word2vec". Later, Transformer-based models, such as BERT, have improved upon the GloVe model.^[24]

In 2014, Socher founded MetaMind, an AI and software company subsequently acquired by Salesforce in 2016.^[27,25] Socher served as Chief Scientist at Salesforce.^[28] In 2020, Socher left Salesforce to co-found You.com.^[16] In September 2025, You.com raised $100 million in a Series C round led by Cox Enterprises, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. In 2025, Socher co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, a company pursuing recursive self-improvement in AI, alongside seven other researchers. The company emerged from stealth in May 2026, having raised more than $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation from investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Greycroft, Nvidia, and AMD.^[9,29,30]