“if you care about the outputs of an industry or a company, then you love AI. If you get paid hourly, you probably hate AI.” Richard Socher · The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck
AI Research & Frontier Labs · September 2026
Matt Turck had just asked about the industry's stock defense of itself — that AI is going to cure cancer. Socher doesn't answer that directly. He reframes the whole controversy as a split between people who own the output of a business and people who sell their hours to it, then argues the upside case for AI is that it pushes more people into the first group.
Transcript
It's a good question. And sort of touches upon what some people call the hard takeoff too, where some people think once we have RSI and generally with AI, there will be this really hard takeoff and then everything will just happen very quickly. And as bullish and excited as I am about AI, I'm not a believer in this crazy hard takeoff. I think, yes, things will accelerate, but there are certain things that will just require time because of physics and constraints in the real world, such as like long-term trials that you want to know whether people have some issue like three years after they stop taking the drug and things like that. And so there will be some delays, but the biggest difference is that the whole biomarket and somewhat contrarian take that we have at AIX Ventures too. A lot of folks think that like bio is just a terrible space to invest in because in the past, a lot of drug companies kind of spent eight, 10 years. They finally get, you know, they have to be public because there's not enough late-stage bioinvestors. So they go public with one drug or maybe two drugs in late stage trials like stage three. And then the stage three trial fails and then the whole company is dead. Now, what we're seeing, the difference is like we now have companies that instead of having one molecular drug after eight years in late stage trials, they actually within six to 18 months have multiple different drugs in like late stage two trials already. And by the time they'll go public, it'll be with like eight plus different drugs that are then also much more likely to succeed because we have better predictive models.
So clearly we are living in a moment when AI has become quite controversial, whether that's the job question or the data center question. The number one thing the industry keeps saying as a way to justify why AI is a great thing is AI is going to cure cancer. What is your sense of the reality of that claim and what it's going to take to get there? There's
a lot to unpack there. Maybe at a very high level, I think if you care about the outputs of an industry or a company, then you love AI. If you get paid hourly, you probably hate AI. And so AI in the positive instantiation of this future is a huge force towards more entrepreneurial thinking. If you're an entrepreneur, generally you kind of love AI because it's making your things more efficient. You just get more done. You have to like, you have an unlimited list of things to do if you're a startup founder or just running a company. And to have an AI do many of those things for you just means you can do a lot more. But if you're basically being told you're training your replacement and you're like all your data is being collected hourly, then you know at some point those hours will end and then the eye will just do the thing you just taught it how to do. And so it's understandable that people, like if they have this like very unentrepreneurial mindset of just getting paid by the hour and they don't own Any equity in creating that IP, then they're understandably unhappy. And then you can go one level deeper and think about, well, what is the impact on jobs? And my theory here, after thinking about this for quite some time, is largely dependent on the elasticity of the demand of the product when its prices go down. And so concretely, for instance, illustrators, illustrators hate AI. The world needs a certain amount of illustrations. Because of AI, you cannot charge 200 bucks anymore for one illustration. So now any little blog post has illustrations. If your goal was just to see more illustrations in the world that are specific to a text, you love AI. If you got paid 200 bucks for one illustration and now it's worth two cents, maybe you hate it, right? And so the problem was that the demand for illustrations didn't go 1,000 X when the price went down by 1000x. It didn't grow because you just don't need that many illustrations in the world. Now in coding, it was a very different world. Actually, as coding got cheaper and cheaper, you had this famous Jevons paradox that everyone's talking about now. I think I was the first, at least I didn't see it online for a while. It's like an interesting fact from history. And you actually like the thing got cheaper and cheaper, but we actually used more and more of it. And for coding, that will definitely be the case. And so we're seeing actually more demand for programmers now because they're so much more productive when they use AI. And anyone ultimately could have like dozens of apps on their phone that are unique to that person, that are modified in some way and very special. And there's so many other ideas that people didn't explore because it was like, maybe the market wasn't that big, but now that you can just create an app really quickly, why not? And so I think that is another aspect of jobs. And so go back to cancer. Yes, I do believe actually AI will play a big role in curing multiple cancers. We are seeing trials now where AI is being used to make a specific cocktail of drugs, create specific RNA sequences and so on for the types of cancer. And each cancer often is also not one homogeneous thing. It has different types of sub cancers in it and so on. And you need to specialize treatments for each person and for the various different forms of the different cancers that you can have. And so all of that is much, much more feasible to be done with AI. And we're seeing it.
Is that precisely the point that cancer is just extremely complex and ultimately a system problem
that AI
is uniquely equipped to solve? Exactly.