You.com’s Multimodal Chat Search Aims at Microsoft and Google

Richard Socher, the creator of You.com, is aware that his business has always been a David battling Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft for supremacy in the search market.

He likes to remind out that his business developed a generative AI-based search in December, well in advance of the announcements from the other major competitors in the search market.

The business announced today that it will use multimodal search to expand on that head start. In order to provide a more accurate response, it can therefore incorporate elements that go beyond the text.

So, if you ask, “Which firm has the most CRM market share?” you will receive the response “Salesforce,” and if you ask, “What is Salesforce’s stock price?” you will receive a stock chart rather than a text-based response.

According to Socher, that represents a significant advancement for chat-based search and puts his business in front of much bigger rivals. 

Socher told TechCrunch, “We’ll just show you our stock app right there inside the discussion, instead of making up a lot of numbers, which is what every other language model would do.”

He thinks that’s a much better method to respond to that kind of inquiry, and depending on the situation, these other modalities can be used to answer other issues.

Large language models becoming multimodal in the sense that the many modalities include text, code, tables, graphs, photos, and interactive features is a significant advancement; in some cases, that is the ideal approach to respond to a query.

I genuinely think that this is a better manner than any writing could be to communicate the response to this issue,” he remarked.

With the idea that there was an opportunity for a different search engine that relied more on AI, You.com started at the end of 2020.

 Although the search market has caught up with that idea, Socher believes there is still potential for a novel strategy that the incumbents are unable to provide.

He wants You.com to be the anti-Google, as he stated to TechCrunch during his company’s $25 million investment round last summer.

Google is a closed, monopolistic, monolithic search engine that ultimately uses AI against consumers to further its primary objective of advertising.

At the time, he told TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers, “We’re establishing You.com as a search platform that’s open and promotes directly meeting user requirements with You.com apps rather than inundating users with adverts.

Socher is reluctant to release the technology that powers his company’s search at this time out of fear that his rivals would be able to use it against him, but he promises that at some point he will divulge the trade secrets he is utilizing to develop his company’s search solution.

Right now, we don’t really share how we created it. I am aware that many individuals are incredibly interested in the construction process of all of this. However, many individuals are attempting to imitate what we’re doing.

And it simply doesn’t make sense to release all of our technology, or even high level or specifics on how we’re doing any of it, until we’re at least default live or profitable as a startup, he continued.

He claims that the business is expanding by double digits each month and that millions of individuals are now utilizing the website daily. Though it won’t be like Google or Bing, they are still thinking about how to make money.

We are not required to earn $500 million every day. As a startup, we are not under that strain at the moment. However, we’ll consider monetization this year and try to go alternative routes, he added.

This includes private adverts, and subscriptions to various add-ons, such as one that costs a few dollars a week and helps users write essays and blog entries, and they might also open the platform to allow developers to create third-party apps like the stock app that shows a stock chart.

“You may allow that third-party app to only provide a service, and when it’s pertinent to the user and the user wants to purchase whatever that firm sells, then we get a share of that. In other words, it’s sort of monetizing the end of the funnel rather than the start, like what advertisements do,” he explained.

Even while he is aware of the fierce competition he faces, he is confident that You.com has managed to set itself apart from the rest.

It’s undoubtedly a difficult market to compete in, so you must create something that is both distinctive and new and good enough to satisfy the majority of the needs people currently have for a search engine, he added.

And that’s what we’ve done, and it’s one of the reasons we’re able to expand now and offer a brand-new viewpoint on what a search engine can or should be able to accomplish for you.