Will Bryk, CEO of Exa.ai, discusses the founding thesis of Exa compared to legacy keyword search.
Assertion Supported
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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…”