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While there ’s no shortage of startups aiming to supplant Google withAI - powered search(we’re looking at you , Perplexity ) , a startup calledExahas a different approximation : a GoogleforAI .
Humans are n’t the one who urgently involve a new kind of search locomotive engine , Exa ’s laminitis believe . Rather , as AI increasingly aim wait in incarnate and consumer life sentence , it is the AI platforms themselves that must regularly pretend out onto the cyberspace to search for entropy and return bona fide response , not hallucinations . And they ca n’t just type their requests on their keyboards .
Exa is building a creature that allows AI models to do something like a World Wide Web search , but with an AI - native twist .
The co - father bought a million dollars ’ worth of GPUs ( which were well-situated to get in those days ) and , using a vector database and embeddings ( not a authoritative transformer - free-base LLM ) , they began to build a machine get wind model groom to natively realize link rather than words and judgment of conviction .
“ transformer commonly predict the next word . We train our lookup engine to forecast the next link , ” chief executive officer Will Bryk says . “ So people partake links on the WWW ; we use that datum as a dataset for our model that we train . And we train the example to predict the next link . So it ’s a refreshing search algorithm . ”
So just as an LLM would dispatch a sentence by furnish the most probable next word , Exa ’s organization does so with the most likely data link ( or 10 ) , but presumptively minus the SEO spam and ( ironically ) AI - generated brother choke off every ordinary search engine these days .
On Monday the startup announced it raised a young $ 17 million Series A led by Lightspeed ’s Guru Chahal , with involution from Nvidia ’s speculation weapon NVentures and Y Combinator , it solely told TechCrunch . Exa has now raised a total of $ 22 million , including its previous $ 5 million germ . ( Exa was in the summer 2021 YC cohort . )
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“ This is a very challenging vision , ” says Chahal . “ What Google is to human beings , they are build for AI . ”
The squad was founded about a year before ChatGPT was launched , by two skilful friends who met their fledgeling year at Harvard : CEO Will Bryk ( now 27 ) and co - founder Jeff Wang ( 26 ) .
“ We launched before ChatGPT . Our initial goal as a society was not to function AIs at all . It was : how do you employ AI to build up practiced search ? ” Wang said .
After ChatGPT rage the technical school humans , AI companies begin asking Exa for an API version of their search engine that they could plug into their models . Exa is place in San Francisco , part of the informal Cerebral Valley AI startup exercise set . In fact , as TechCrunch previously report , a tweet by Wang went viral when he was look for other company that want to go inon an order of agency snooze pod and the response was overpowering . ( The body of work - nap - repeat culture is awake and well in this part of the tech industry . )
With AI companies now as its basal client , use cases for Exa ’s lookup locomotive span everything from an AI chatbot looking up information on the cyberspace while answering customers ’ doubtfulness to companies looking to curate breeding data .
Databricks , for instance , is Exa ’s marquee client , using it to detect large breeding set for its own model training opening move , the founding father say .
The API version of the product was launched around a twelvemonth ago . “ Since then it ’s gotten a screwball amount of traction , ” Wang says . Today Exa says it ’s serving thousands of developer — although it ’s worth pointing out that Exa has a free tier that allow anyone to try its hunt engine in a modified way . It also has multiple tiered - fee degree . The founders would n’t disclose gross except to say that they have some and the act is going up . ( Interestingly , asunder from running its own GPU - cluster , Exa hosts its production on AWS , not the AI - forwards Google Cloud . )
The team is n’t particularly pore on being the hunting startup that upend Google . Although if AI becomes the be - all / remnant - all that the technical school manufacture thinks it will be , search engine for AI bot could be the unexpected threat to the search hegemony .
