- Richard Socher, a one -time chief of he in Salesforce, is building a Google search competitor.
- Socher says Google’s search monopoly is under threat as users are now eager to try alternatives.
- Ju.com is a dark calf in the competition to abolish Google search.
In the rapid world of artificial intelligence, the once inaccessible prevalence of technology giants like Google is being challenged, says Richard Socher, founder and CEO I you.com.
Socher runs a Google competitor that is built for knowledge workers. Established as a search engine, JU.com has expanded its repertoire over the years including digital agents to write essays, searching online and other tasks. So far, the company has raised about $ 100 million in funds.
In an interview with Business Insider, Socher expressed a belief that the era of a single company that holds an excess, long monopoly in the technology industry, similar to what Google experienced in the field of research is coming to an end.
Socher said users are now more likely to explore new options, charged with artificial intelligence and pass between services more easily than in the past.
“This kind of crazy, untouchable monopoly that Google had for 20 years, those days are over,” Socher said. “I don’t think any company will have such a strong monopoly for such a long time because users are getting faster to pass and thirsty to try things.”
This change in user behavior will mean that companies, even those with significant market power, can no longer rely on maintaining a monopoly based solely on inertia or predetermined settings. On the contrary, these companies must constantly innovate and offer genuine value to maintain their user base.
Meanwhile, new entrances and smaller players like you.com are taking an opportunity to get users that are open to explore alternatives.
Since the beginning in 2021, you..com says it has reached the “millions” people. The platform is free to use, with premium features available through a monthly $ 15 plan. You also provide enterprise customers a tool -designed tool to bring real -time internet research to their applications.
The company tells Business Insider its income has increased a lot since the beginning of 2024, reaching 100 times the amount earned last year.
Ju.com Bryan McCann and Richard Socher’s associates. You.com
Before taking Google Search, Socher founded a deep learned company called Metamind that he sold in Salesforce. He became the chief scientist in Salesforce, where he led the company’s search efforts and worked to bring about natural language processing and computer vision on its platform.
In 2018, while in Salesforce, Socher published a work together with Bryan McCann, another Salesforce’s study scientist in Multitask Learning – a method in learning machinery where a model is trained to perform numerous tasks at the same time. The newspaper influenced subsequent research in the field, with Dario Amodei and Ilya Sutskyr quoting it in a letter from their lab, Openi, a year later.
The research also planted an idea for a new type of search engine. Socher remembered thinking, “If you can have a nervous network that answers all your questions, why I’m still going to Google where I get these blue links lists?” In 2020, he and McCann left Salesforce to start Ju.com. Marc Benioff wrote one of the first checks.
The future of searching is still for capture, and the socher will have more to fight than Google. Companies like Openai and Perplexity are closed in a competition to provide the most popular conversation -based search engine, and hundreds of millions of active chatgt users make you the base of you look weak. Moreover, Openai has considered the development of an online browser, reported information, while confusion has harassed an online browser called Comet, who can provide quieter and integrated user experiences.
In this environment, the real search winners will be those who predict the next big change and are agile enough to lead it. As Socher said, “I did peace with the fact that he will simply continue to change. We will have to move quickly.”