Language Modeling and Protein Generation at Salesforce with Richard Socher

Today we're joined Richard Socher, Chief Scientist and Executive VP at Salesforce. Richard, who has been at the forefront of Salesforce's AI Research since they acquired his startup Metamind in 2016, and his team have been publishing a ton of great projects as of late, including CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation, and ProGen, an AI Protein Generator, both of which we cover in-depth in this conversation. We explore the balancing act between investments, product requirement research and otherwise at a large product-focused company like Salesforce, the evolution of his language modeling research since being acquired, and how it ties in with Protein Generation.