Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
You can kind of think of Google as being synonymous with search, right? It's one of the greatest tech monopolies of the last few decades.
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 misleading in some way or straight up wrong. And if everyone had information that was accurate, most reasonable people would be reasonable.
We have a family open club, Michael Clodberg, and we wanted to give it web access. And he was like, I recommend Exa.
The 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, you could search something and then get not just 10 results or 100 results, but 1,000 results or 10,000. How have we, a team that has always been below 100 people, been able to build a search engine that's better than Google in all sorts of ways? 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 Brick about search, AI agents, and the future of information retrieval.
Welcome, Will. Thank you for being here.
Well, excited to be here.
So I want to start with the origin story. You've been interested in search for a long time.
How did Exa's origins influence its search capabilities?
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?
Yeah, 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, right? 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 at 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 going to devote my life to this because it's 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 of things, 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.
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 tech monopolies of the last few decades. The idea that a startup could be better than Google at search is quite amazing. But how do you define perfect search?
Why are traditional search engines unsuitable for AI agents?
And what do you see as the limitations of Google? And I'll throw in more recent events because obviously, you know, IO just took place last week and they're very focused on AI mode and how they talk about the idea of information agents and things like that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:33
2
How did Exa's origins influence its search capabilities?
1:33–3:11
3
Why are traditional search engines unsuitable for AI agents?
3:11–4:23
4
What challenges do AI agents face in information retrieval?
4:23–5:15
5
How is Exa building a better search engine than Google?
5:15–6:31
6
What role does data access play in AI-driven search?
6:31–8:26
7
How does the agent economy impact search infrastructure?
8:26–10:57
8
What is the future of search in the context of AI advancements?
10:57–49:32
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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