Will Bryk

Will Bryk is co-founder and CEO of Exa, a search company in San Francisco, California, that sells a web search API to AI companies. He started it in 2021 with Jeff Wang, his best friend since they met as freshmen at Harvard. The company was first called Metaphor Systems and went through Y Combinator in summer 2021.

A lifelong search problem

Bryk says search has been his interest since childhood. In high school he wanted to improve how people get news, and in college he built a small search engine. He interned at SpaceX and worked on robotics, including at the self-driving company Zoox, before Exa. “I would say my entire life has kind of been rotating around this problem,” he said on the Latent Space podcast.

Predicting the next link

Exa launched before ChatGPT with the aim of building a better search engine for people. After ChatGPT, AI companies asked for an API, and that became the business. Exa trains its models on how people share links. “Transformers normally predict the next word. We train our search engine to predict the next link,” Bryk told TechCrunch. He describes the goal as “perfect search,” where any request, however complex, returns exactly what is needed.