We're creating Exastential - a magazine to discuss the most existential period in human history, brought about by AI. Seeking writers and artists to submit piercing essays, videos, whatever perspective you think needs sharing in whatever format. There's no shortage of topics that need your help exploring. Whole swaths of humanity are currently being overhauled -- education, relationships, societal structure, the economy, war. We all bear the weight of the future, we all should help shape it. Take education. I have nieces and nephews, and I genuinely have no idea what schooling means anymore in the age of personal AI tutors. Relationships are changing too -- my nieces no longer ask me for help with math homework. On that note, math could be automated within a year. Physics falls next. Does the human mind matter anymore? I have perspectives on this, and I'll be submitting something too. Decades are happening in years. Soon they'll happen in months. Help us all become intellectually and emotionally ready. Submissions are open:

The world needs an open AI ecosystem, where no one company owns the the model, the search, the browser, and other layers. Freedom of user choice leads to freedom of opportunity. This is very analogous to the open internet ecosystem that @firefox has defended for decades. Has been very fun to work with Ajit and team.

Last week, Exa took over SF's Pioneer Building, previously home to Stripe, OpenAI, and most recently xAI. Elon assembled the Colossus cluster here (his mattress was still lying there during our tour). Alec Radford trained GPT-3 here. The Collison brothers built the web's financial backbone here. They were all infra companies: Stripe -> Financial infra OpenAI -> Intelligence infra xAI -> Compute infra Each entered Pioneer as a small startup with enormous ambitions and left as a foundational layer for the world. Exa -> Information infra We entered Pioneer as web search for agents, but by the time we leave we'll have organized all the world's data into a foundational information layer. This will require things like deploying satellites, new misinformation detection algorithms, and embedding retrieval on an outrageous scale. Whatever is necessary to keep billions of people and trillions of AIs as informed as possible. A trusted information ecosystem is necessary to safely navigate this chaotic AI era, an era that was set in motion by our previous occupants.

Calling all filmmakers/artists/idealists, if you want a say in the future, then step up right now. There is historic alpha in being the first person to depict an AI future that's exciting. We have enough essays, we need a visual depiction of a post-AGI world that's happy. No drama needed, no romance, just some realistic future to look forward to. POV from a jetpack, a day in the life of 2060, anything. This is the easiest / most impactful work someone could be doing right now.

Exa is now one of the largest indexes in the world. We serve 80B pages, track 1.4T urls, and are on track to be Google-scale in early 2027. It's difficult to know the size of indexes, but we estimate Google to be ~1T, Bing to be ~500B, and Yandex ~200B. Brave mentioned in April that they're at 40B. Most of the web is trash that can hurt AI outputs, so you actually have to crawl way more than you serve and train models to filter out the trash. In terms of peak QPS, we estimate Bing at roughly 30k/s and Google at ~500k/s. In our case, because agent traffic often requires large fan-out (deep searches can use dozens of sub-searches) and can be spiky (like when AI labs RL with us), we're already starting to provision for Bing-scale traffic. Within 2 years, agents will search at many millions per second. They'll also want comprehensiveness over all data, far bigger than any index today. So the retrieval infra required will be larger than Google-scale in both dimensions.