Richard Socher: The real danger of AI is human bias, not evil robots

He's the founder of MetaMind, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that raised more than $8 million in venture capital backing from Khosla Ventures and others before being acquired by Salesforce in 2016, and he previously served as adjunct professor at Stanford's computer science department, where he also received his Ph.D. (He earned his bachelor's degree at Leipzig University and his master's at Saarland University.) In 2007, Socher was part of the team that won first place in the semantic robot vision challenge. And he was instrumental in assembling ImageNet, a publicly available database of annotated images used to test, train, and validate computer vision models. Socher -- who's now Saleforce's chief data scientist -- has long been attracted to the field of natural language processing, a subfield of computer science concerned with interactions between computers and human languages. His dissertation demonstrated that deep learning -- layered mathematical functions loosely modeled on neurons in the human brain -- could solve several different natural language processing tasks simultaneously, obviating the need to develop multiple models.