You.com takes aim at Google and Microsoft with multimodal chat search • TechCrunch

You.com founder Richard Socher knows his company has always been a David chasing the Goliath in search, Google and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft. He likes to point out that his company built generative AI-powered search in December, months before the other search giants made their announcements.

Today, the company announces that it is taking this step forward and that it is relying on multimodal research. This means it can add things beyond the text to help answer a question more precisely. Suppose you ask a question such as “Which company has the largest CRM market share”, you will get the answer “Salesforce”, and if you follow up with “What is Saleforce’s stock price?” you’ll get a stock chart instead. of a text response.

Socher says it’s a big step forward for chat-based search and puts his company ahead of much larger competitors. “Instead of making up a bunch of numbers, which every other language model would do, we’re just going to show you our stock app right there in the conversation,” Socher told TechCrunch.

He thinks it’s a much more efficient way to answer this kind of question and these different modalities can be applied to other questions depending on the context. “It’s a big step forward for large language models to be multimodal in the sense that the different modalities are text, but also code, but also tables, and also graphics, images and interactive elements. – and that’s sometimes the best way to answer your question. I really believe that this better way of representing the answer to that question than any text could be,” he said.

You.com was launched in late 2020 with the belief that there was room for another, more AI-based search engine. It’s a notion the search market has caught up to, but Socher sees room for a new approach, one that incumbents can’t offer.

As he told TechCrunch during his company’s $25 million fundraiser last summer, he wants You.com to be the anti-Google:

“Google is a monolithic, monopolistic search engine that is closed and ultimately weaponized AI against users in an effort to serve its true purpose: advertising. We are building You.com as a search platform that is open and emphasizes meeting user needs directly with You.com apps instead of bombarding people with ads,” he told TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers at the time.

Socher is reluctant to discuss the technology behind his company’s research at this point, fearing competitors could use it against him, but he says at some point he will reveal the secret sauce he uses to build the his company’s search solution.

“We’re not really sharing right now how we built it. I know a lot of people are very curious about how we’re building all of this. But a lot of people are trying to copy what we’re doing. And that hasn’t just doesn’t really make sense until we’re at least default live or profitable as a startup to share all of our technology, or even a high level or detail of how we do it,” he said. -he declares.

He says the company is seeing double-digit percentage growth every month and millions of people are using the site every day now. They’re still thinking about how to monetize, but it won’t be like Google or Bing.

“We don’t have to make $500 million a day. We don’t have that pressure right now as a startup. But we will think about monetization this year, and we will try to explore different avenues,” he said. This includes private advertisements, subscriptions to different add-ons like the one they have that helps users write essays and blog posts for a few bucks a week, and they could also open up the platform to build apps third parties like the stock app that displays a stock chart.

“You can allow this third-party app to only sell a service, and when that’s relevant to the user, and the user wants to buy whatever that company sells, we get a cut of that. So it’s sort of kind of monetize the end of the funnel rather than the beginning of the funnel, which is what ads do,” he said.

He certainly understands that he faces tough competition, but he thinks You.com has found a way to differentiate itself from its competitors.

“It’s definitely a tough space to compete in, that’s for sure, and you need to create something that’s both unique and different, but at the same time good enough to capture most of the things that people currently want from their search engine,” he said.

“And that’s what we did, and that’s part of why we’re able to grow now and provide a fresh perspective on what a search engine can or should be able to help you with. “