Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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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 kinda think of Google as being synonymous with search. Right? It's one of the greatest technopolis of the last few decades.
If you wanna go really deep into some topic, Google fails. Most people wanna 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.
We have a family open claw, Michael Claudeberg, and we wanted to give it web access, and he was like, I recommend Eggsa.
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 Excel, like, could search something and then get not just, 10 results or a 100 results, but a thousand results or 10,000. How have we, a team that, you know, has always been below a 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 challenges around retrieval, knowledge discovery, and how information is organized online. Sarah Wang speaks with Exa cofounder and CEO Will Brick about search, AI agents, and the future of information retrieval.
Welcome, Will.
Thank you
for being here.
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