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The TWIML AI Podcast · 4 min · Nov 3, 2026

AI's scientific benefits belong in debates about dual-use risks

Richard Socher · Co-founder, Recursive

Richard Socher says destructive uses warrant regulation but argues science AI could reduce suffering.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 16:34Scientific ideas grow by combining work across different fields5 min
  2. 21:07Reward design steers AI and can invite reward hacking5 min
  3. 29:22Recursive reports beating community results on AI benchmarks4 min
  4. 5:46Organoids can bypass animal trials and AI can revive shelved drugs5 min
  5. 32:59Verification speed sets the limits for AI research agents5 min
  6. 10:13A science AI needs data, simulations and robotic experiments6 min
  7. 41:40AI rules should target applications, not abstract intelligence3 min
  8. 44:25AI's scientific benefits belong in debates about dual-use risks4 min
Up next · a16z PodcastAI can make smaller legal cases viable for contingency firms5:08
“And coal kills about 50,000 people a year from lung cancer.”
Richard Socherat 47:33 · The TWIML AI Podcast
47:33

Takeaways

  1. He compares AI science’s dual-use risks with nuclear technology.
  2. He argues for regulating destructive applications rather than intelligence broadly.
  3. He says diffuse harms, including coal deaths, should count in risk debates.

About this segment

Richard Socher says destructive uses warrant regulation but argues science AI could reduce suffering. He contrasts fears around nuclear energy with coal’s diffuse health toll, citing about 50,000 annual lung-cancer deaths.

Richard Socher

Richard Socher is a former chief scientist at Salesforce, founder of You.com and cofounder of Recursive.

Pioneered neural networks in NLP, invented widely used word and contextual vectors, and leads Recursive's self-improving AI.

From “Can AI Invent or Just Help Scientists Work Faster?”, Nov 3, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is AI dangerous?” See all 100 answers

Answers “Should AI be regulated?” See all 46 answers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 44:27

    regulate those. Eureka machine, does it touch on potential harms from AI within the scientific domain? A little bit. But I feel like there's a lot of people who are very creative and it's so easy in some ways to come up with dystopian scenarios. Everyone feels really smart, but it's actually very easy to come up with dystopian scenarios. It's very entertaining too. And many like part of why the human species survived at all is that we think about worst case scenarios and people have anxiety over that.

  2. 44:56

    And so it's very natural. I think it's much harder to come up with like, okay, if we have this like really good ability to attack someone, what's the next most creative thing that you will come up with to defend yourself against that? And so when it comes to science, I think of course science has, like AI sort of often multi-use, omni-use, dual-use types of scenarios. Like we understood the atom better that led to like clean nuclear energy, it also led to nuclear weapons, right?

  3. 45:27

    And so when a weapon is so destructive that it could end like a huge part of humanity, then you regulate it. And so like we did with nuclear weapons, I think intelligence is not just a weapon. Intelligence can also write a poem. Don't want to regulate all of that the way you regulate the printing press. And so there's a lot of complexity and of course there's more agency in AI. And so you have to kind of think multiple steps ahead of like who asked the AI to do something and how responsible are they.

  4. 45:58

    I think that a lot of these problems would go away if you just made people navigating and using the AI and asking it and giving it the rewards to be responsible for the actions of the AI. A lot of those problems would then go away and people would be much more careful about what they're doing. And so long story short, we touch upon it in the book. um uh and you know i think especially the the viral vector uh could be suboptimal that's why gain-of-function research is already illegal you know like you don't have to create new laws around that um it's already not allowed and so um yeah i'm focused much more in the book on the positive applications in general you think about science too and a lot of people think about AI as automating jobs. I think few people say we want more science jobs. We want more medicine jobs.

  5. 46:53

    We want more research jobs. But a lot of people, pretty much everyone is excited when science comes up with a new capability, a new device, a new material, a new drug, a new cure for disease. And when people can get out of the hospital faster with less cost, right? So that's kind of, I think, where we could focus on a lot more and where I think we should like really outline like there's a lot of suffering right now in the world.

  6. 47:20

    I think AI can actually help in improving that. And, you know, I think when you look at GMOs and nuclear energy and so on, that led a lot of people to end up using like the fears around that technology ended up a lot more coal being used. And coal kills about 50,000 people a year from lung cancer. It's all diffused and through the air and yet they're not like the lung cancer isn't just right next to the factory.

  7. 47:45

    But lung cancer kills lots of people and a lot of that can be traced back to coal. Nuclear has not killed nearly as many people, but it has this like crazy fear industry around it. And I think AI, I hope we'll end up in that same place. Well, Richard, it's been great catching up with you. Always a pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure to chat.