Beating Google at Search with Neural PageRank and $5M of H200s — with Will Bryk of Exa.ai

**Alessio** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in Residence and Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of SmallAI.

**Swyx** (0:13)
Hey, and today we're in the studio with my good friend and former landlord, Will Bryk.

**Will Bryk** (0:19)
Roommate. How you doing?

**Swyx** (0:22)
Will, you're now CEO, co-founder of ExaAI, used to be Metaphor Systems. What's your background, your story?

**Will Bryk** (0:31)
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I'm CEO of Exa. I've been doing it for three years. I guess I've always been interested in search, whether I knew it or not. Like, since I was a kid, I've always been interested in, like, high-quality information. And, like, you know, even in high school, wanted to improve the way we get information from news. And then in college, built a mini search engine. And then with Exa, like, you know, it's kind of, like, fulfilling the dream of actually being able to solve all the information needs I wanted as a kid. Yeah, I guess I would say my entire life is kind of rotating around this problem, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

**Swyx** (1:05)
What do you enter YC with?

**Will Bryk** (1:07)
We entered YC with, We Are Better Than Google, at Google 2.0.

**Swyx** (1:13)
What makes you say that? Like, that's so audacious to come out the box with.

**Will Bryk** (1:17)
Yeah. Okay. So you have to remember the time. This was summer 2021, and GBD3 had come out. Like, here was this magical thing that you could talk to, you could enter a whole paragraph, and it understands what you mean, it understands the subtlety of your language. And then there was Google, which felt like it hadn't changed in a decade, because it really hadn't, and 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. And so, like, Google could barely understand you, GBD3 could, and the theory was, what if you could make a search engine that actually understood you? What if you could apply the insights from LLMs to a search engine? And it's really been the same idea ever since, and we're actually a lot closer now to doing that, yeah.

**Alessio** (1:56)
Did you have any trouble making people believe, obviously, there's the same moment YC overlapped? Was YC pretty AI forward, even 2021, or?

**Will Bryk** (2:04)
It's nothing like it is today, but there were a few AI companies, but we were definitely, like, bold, and I think people, VCs generally like boldness, and we definitely had some AI background, and we had a working demo, so there was evidence that we could build something that was going to work. But yeah, I think, like, the fundamentals were there. I think people at the time were talking about how, you know, Google was failing in a lot of ways, and so there was a bit of conversation about it, but AI was not a big thing at the time.

**Alessio** (2:34)
Before we jump into Exa, any fun background stories? I know you interned at SpaceX, any Elon stories? I know you were at Zoox as well, you know, kind of like robotics at Harvard. Any stuff that you saw early that you thought was going to get solved, and maybe it's not solved today?

**Will Bryk** (2:49)
Oh, yeah, I mean, lots of things like that. Like, I never really learned how to drive because I believed Elon, that self-driving cars, would happen. It did happen, and I take them every night to get home, but it took like 10 more years than I thought.

**Swyx** (2:59)
Do you still not know how to drive?

**Will Bryk** (3:00)
I know how to drive now. I learned it like two years ago.

**Swyx** (3:02)
That would have been great to like just, you know.

**Will Bryk** (3:07)
I was obsessed with Elon, yeah. I mean, I worked at SpaceX because I really just wanted to work at one of his companies. And I remember they had a rule like interns cannot touch Elon. And that rule actually influenced my actions.

**Swyx** (3:19)
Is it, but can Elon touch interns?

**Alessio** (3:22)
Like physically or like talk? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

**Will Bryk** (3:25)
He's changed a lot. But I mean, his companies are amazing.

**Swyx** (3:29)
What if you beat him at Diablo 2, Diablo 4, you know?

**Will Bryk** (3:32)
Oh, maybe.

**Alessio** (3:32)
Yeah.

**Will Bryk** (3:35)
Yeah.

**Alessio** (3:36)
When I jump into Swyx, I know there's a lot of back story. It used to be called Metaphor Systems. So, and you've always been kind of like a prominent company, maybe at least RAI circles and NSF.