Socher's Recursive raises $4.65B seed to automate AI research

Richard Socher has spent over two decades in AI, from early embeddings work like GloVe to founding You.com. At You.com, the company eventually off-ramped from pushing the AI frontier to focusing on search APIs and answers over the web, which Socher still sees as a core part of intelligence because it gives systems access to what has already been invented. That shift left room for a new venture focused on the frontier itself.

Recursive grew out of ideas Socher had been developing for years, which he put into his book "The Eureka Machine." The company has assembled researchers in open-endedness and self-improving agents, and its early work includes an AI research system that Socher says outperformed humans and their agents on optimization tasks and found improvements on NVIDIA GPU kernels. Socher frames this as a step toward AI that can accelerate research currently requiring thousands of people and years.

Whether Recursive can deliver on that vision hinges on scaling these early optimization and kernel results to harder scientific problems. The $4.65B seed round and the September book release may raise expectations among researchers and investors tracking efforts to automate AI research itself.