Will Bryk
Founder, ExaAI · 1 appearance on the record.
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Will Bryk is the leader of ExaAI, an AI search engine company previously known as Metaphor Systems. He previously held roles at SpaceX and Zoox.
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 4 assertions · 3 opinions · 6 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Will argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Bryk: Perplexity and ChatGPT Search rely on legacy Google and Bing APIs
“So these systems, there are a few of them now they basically rely on like traditional search engines like Google or Bing, and then they combine them with like LLMs at the end to, you know, output some power graphics answering your question. So they, Like, Sear…”
Everything Will Bryk said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Bryk: Perplexity and ChatGPT Search rely on legacy Google and Bing APIs
“So these systems, there are a few of them now they basically rely on like traditional search engines like Google or Bing, and then they combine them with like LLMs at the end to, you know, output some power graphics answering your question. So they, Like, Sear…”
Bryk: Exa applies OpenAI's o1 variable compute paradigm to web search
“One way of thinking about what we built is like O-one for search because, Oh, one is all about like, you know, some questions require more compute than others, and we'll put as much compute into the question as we need to solve it. So similarly with our search…”
Bryk: Neural link prediction is strictly more powerful than Google's PageRank
“The link prediction objective can be seen as like a neural page rank, because what you're doing is you're predicting the links people share. And so if everyone is sharing some Paul Graham essay about fundraising, then like our model is more likely to predict i…”
Bryk: Google Search hadn't changed in a decade by 2021
“And then there was Google which felt like it hadn't changed in a decade because it really hadn't. And it like, you would give it a simple query, like, I don't know shirts without stripes, and it would give you a bunch of results for the shirts with stripes.”
Bryk: Exa is the 'OpenAI of search' building AGI for retrieval
“I often say we're the OpenAI of search because we're a research company, we're a research startup that does like fundamental research into making like AGI for search in a way. And then we have all these like business products that come out of that.”
Bryk: Superintelligent models like GPT-5 will fail using Google Search
“You could have a world, and we are going to have this world, where you have, like, GPT-V level systems and beyond that could, like, answer any complex request. Unless it requires some, like, if you say, like you know, give me a list of all the PhDs in New York…”
Bryk: Smaller LLMs with search tools are vastly superior to massive memorization models
“Yes, I believe this is a much more optimal system to have a smaller LLM that's really just like an intelligence module. And it makes a call to a search tool. That's way more efficient because if, okay, I mean, the opposite of that would be like the LLM is so b…”
Bryk: Google and Bing rely on limited keyword algorithms due to constraints
“Google and Bing work, and they're just not using new methods. There are all sorts of reasons for that. Like, one, like, Google has to be comprehensive over the web, so they're, and they have to return in 400 milliseconds. And those two things combined means th…”
Bryk: Searching the open long tail captures most web search value
“One response is just that there's so much value in the long tail of sites that are open. And just like, even just searching over those well gets you most of the value.”
Bryk: The internet's content strictly mirrors what search engines optimize for
“Whatever the search engine optimizes for is what the internet looks like.”
Bryk: Google and Bing completely fail when given paragraph queries
“Traditional search engines like Google or Bing, they're actually designed for humans typing keywords. If you give a paragraph to Google or Bing, they just completely fail.”
Exa.ai uses LLMs as data labelers instead of humans
“We could get by, which we are right now doing, using, like, LLMs as the labelers.”
Bryk: Search engines do not need PhD-level training data
“With search, you're asking, like, simple questions about billions of things, like, is this a startup? Did this person write a blog post about search? You know, those are actually simple questions. You don't need, like, PhD level training data.”
Bryk: Exa's initial foundation model predicted documents rather than raw URLs
“The link refers here to a document. It's not, I think one confusing thing is it's not, you're not actually predicting the URL itself. That would require like the system to have memorized URLs. You're actually like getting the actual document. A more accurate n…”
Exa runs core search subsystems with one or two people each
“And so it's like the crawling system, the AI processing system, and then the serving system. Those are all like, you know, teams of like hundreds, maybe thousands of people at Google. But for us, it's like one or two people each typically, but”
Bryk: Comprehensive web search requires variable compute scaled to query complexity
“What you basically have to do is you have to put more compute into the query, into the search, until you get the full comprehensiveness. And I think there's an interesting point here, which is that not all queries are made equal. Some queries, just like this b…”
Bryk: Content creators will establish data partnerships with search entities
“I do see the world as like the future where the data The data producers, the content creators will make partnerships with the entities that find that data.”
Bryk: Exa purchased a $5 million Nvidia H200 GPU cluster
“We now have we just purchased a five million dollar H 200 cluster.”
Bryk: 200x drop in LLM costs requires rethinking search from scratch
“When some very useful tool goes down in cost by 200 X in like the space of, I don't know, a couple years, There are going to be new opportunities in search, right? So like, to not integrate this and build up, to not like rethink search from scratch, the search…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai | Jan 10, 2025 | 32m |