Episode summary
How AI will Affect Financial Markets
How I Invest With David Weisburd
· · Hosts: David Weisburd · Guests: Richard Socher
Summary
Richard Socher argues that AI’s economic impact will come less from hype than from infrastructure, data quality, and timing. He says You.com’s search backend helps agents produce better answers because “the best research is done when you have the most amount of data,” and he points to enterprise use cases in coding, legal work, research, healthcare, and journalism.
He expects the marginal cost of intelligence to keep falling, but he does not think that means a sudden labor collapse. Instead, repetitive cognitive work should be automated while new jobs emerge around judgment, reward design, and agency. He compares the shift to agriculture’s automation: most people moved into different work rather than becoming permanently unemployed.
Socher is bullish on AI’s broad adoption but says it will be gradual and uneven. He thinks developed economies will eventually see AI become their biggest GDP driver, that computer science remains foundational, and that the most durable AI investments are backed by strong teams, real data availability, and a realistic sense of when a market is ready.
Key takeaways
- Socher says AI search wins when it has better data and infrastructure, not just a bigger model.
- He expects AI agents to spread across coding, legal, healthcare, design, and journalism, but over years rather than months.
- Socher argues the labor shock will be gradual because AI automates repetitive cognitive tasks while creating new work around agency and reward design.
- He thinks computer science still matters because it teaches logic, math, and how to control AI systems rather than treat them as magic.
- For investing, Socher looks first at founder quality, technical risk, industry risk, and whether data exists cheaply enough to make a product feasible.
Notable quotes
“the best research is done when you have the most amount of data”
“the marginal cost of intelligence will go to zero”
“what ultimately will become more and more important is agency”
“AI is already changing different industries”
“Computer science is still one of the best things to study”
How the episode opens
We'll get into some of the interesting investing that you do later on, but your full-time job is your co-founder and CEO of UW.com, which is a unicorn, and it's an AI search engine that's more accurate than chat GBT. Tell me about that. And how could that be that a one half billion dollar company is more accurate than OpenAI?
Yeah, so you can obviously not do that across the board, but you can focus on particular areas. And u actually filed a patent for LMS and search a few months before CHP came out. Uh we've been at this for a very long time.
We're also very happy partners with uh OpenAI. Uh GBT OSS uses the UCOM search backend as its default. We also work uh with OpenAI models.
Uh in deep research in particular, the best research is done when you have the most amount of data. And so having the right data and search infrastructure back end is how you get any agent to move above the slop that LM often produce, above the sort of average mediocre outputs. The best way to do that is by giving it more data.
And so that is part of how we were able in a bunch of different evaluations and benchmarks uh outperform uh the deep research agents of open AI
And every day you're working with enterprises solving very hairy issues with AI. What are some case studies and how enterprise is using AI and how does that translate downstream to revenue and cost for for enterprise companies? So we have a very broad range of different customers from very very large consumer companies that make hundreds of millions of API calls or more a month.
Um all the way to legal uh companies, AI legal companies uh that use us for research uh for their agents and we have companies like Windsurf that use us for their coding agents.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- ai agents
- ai search
- enterprise adoption
- labor and productivity
- ai regulation
Companies and tickers mentioned
- CRM
- META
- You.com
- AIX Ventures
- Hugging Face
- Weights and Biases
- Athelas
- Profluent
- Parallel Bio
- Assured Robot Intelligence (ARI)
- Salesforce
- MetaMind
- Meta
Watch the episode
Watch “How AI will Affect Financial Markets” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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How I Invest With David Weisburd, this episode and its artwork belong to David Weisburd. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
