Bryk: Neural link prediction is strictly more powerful than Google's PageRank
Will Bryk · Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai · Jan 10, 2025 · at 22:51
Exa.ai CEO Will Bryk describes how Exa's neural search training objective replaces traditional PageRank.
0:00 / 0:32exact quote · 32.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 it. So like inherent in our training objective is this a sense of like high canonicity and like high quality, but it's more powerful than page rank. It's strictly more powerful because People might refer to that Paul Graham fundraising essay in like a thousand different ways. And so our model learns all the different ways that someone refers that Paul Graham essay while also learning how important that Paul Graham essay is.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Will Bryk
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: 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…”