Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk

**Will Bryk** (0:00)
Search is the gateway to the world's information. If you can make it perfect, then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world.

**Sarah Wang** (0:06)
You can kind of think of Google as being synonymous with search, right? It's one of the greatest technopolis of the last few decades.

**Will Bryk** (0:11)
If you want to go really deep into some topic, Google fails. Most people want to understand the world, but they're getting fed information that's just like, you know, misleading in some way or straight up wrong. And if everyone had like information that was accurate, most reasonable people would be reasonable.

**Sarah Wang** (0:25)
We have a family open-claw, Michael Claudeberg, and we wanted to give it web access, and he was like, I recommend Exa.

**Will Bryk** (0:31)
World of agents searching is just completely different from human searching. An agent doesn't just want 10 pieces of information, it wants everything. With Exa, like, you could search something and then get not just like 10 results or 100 results, but a thousand results or 10,000. How have we, a team that, you know, has always been below a hundred people, been able to build a search engine that's better than Google in all sorts of ways?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:48)
Well, it's because for most of the internet era, search was built for humans. But AI agents search differently. They need deeper context, more complete information and the ability to navigate far more complex questions than a traditional search box was designed to answer. That shift is creating an entirely new set of challenges around retrieval, knowledge discovery, and how information is organized online.
Sarah Wang speaks with Exa co-founder and CEO, Will Bryk, about search, AI agents and the future of information retrieval.

**Sarah Wang** (1:25)
Welcome, Will. Thank you for being here.

**Will Bryk** (1:27)
Well, excited to be here.

**Sarah Wang** (1:28)
So I want to start with the origin story. You've been interested in search for a long time. In fact, you and your co-founder, Jeff, actually started building a mini-search engine in college, which is not what I was doing in college. Can you say more about when you started getting interested in search and why you wanted to solve this problem?

**Will Bryk** (1:46)
Yeah, sure. So I would say it's a life mission. So since I was a kid, I've cared about finding the highest quality knowledge. I was obsessed. And then in high school, I wanted to start a new type of news organization because I thought we're a civilization that got to the moon, we split the atom and yet we can't understand what's going on the border or in science news. Like, why can't we fully understand any topic? And then in college, I was roommates with Jeff and we were like, we could just build a better search using crowdsourcing the highest quality links. And we did build a pretty solid search. But then five years ago, so in 2021, that's when Transformers started to get really good. And it suddenly became possible to build a better search engine than Google. And that was a really important opportunity because search is the gateway to the world's information.
If you could improve search, if you can make it perfect, then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world across every industry, across every part of human life. And so it just felt like this huge opportunity that no one was pursuing. And I was like, I'm willing to devote my life to this because everything I care about is about information. And so yeah, started Exa and now it's gone. We actually made a lot of progress and we're a lot closer to that mission. There's still a huge amount to go.
But yeah, it's been crazy to see how far we've come to achieving that mission that I've been thinking about for years.

**Sarah Wang** (2:55)
Maybe just to probe a little bit deeper, you can kind of think of Google as being synonymous with search, right? It's one of the greatest technopolis of the last few decades. And the idea that a startup could be better than Google at search is quite amazing. But how do you define perfect search? And what do you see as the limitations of Google? And I'll throw in more recent events because obviously at, you know, the AIO just took place last week and they're very focused on AI mode and how they talked about the idea of information agents and things like that. How do you think about beating old Google, if you will? And then there's of course new Google that's evolving.

**Will Bryk** (3:31)
Yeah, I mean, Google was amazing and is amazing for what it's meant to do, which is like get quick answers to consumers.