Charles

Exa just passed $100m in annualized revenue. We've grown almost exactly 10x per year for 3 years. We now handle 2 billion requests a month from 200k+ teams. And it’s still so early: We predict agents will search 1000x more than humans by 2030. Agents don't search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world's data, not just the web. We've spent 5 years building a search engine designed for them. We now serve personal agents, AI labs, coding agents, GTM agents, really any agent. Exa gives these agents access to 100s of billions of web documents and tons of proprietary data. Our customers are increasingly noticing that information is the bottleneck to agent performance. While the world seems close to perfect intelligence with models like Fable and Astra, we are very far from perfect information. To our small but legendary team, thank you for getting us here, from engineering to research to GTM to ops. To our customers, it is an honor to serve you. We have some exciting releases coming soon and can't wait to share them 🫡

We just added hundreds of millions of places to our index. For each entity we add, we extract meaning and structure and add to an index of hundreds of billions. Let us know if there are more types of data you'd like your agents to have access to!

This is the first labor day where you can sense a future where human labor isn't necessary. But do we even want this future? I spent much of this weekend thinking about this question. I went through the full cycle of excitement, fear, meaninglessness, back to excitement. The world could be so amazing? Could we ever control this level of power? But will humans have any value?What do we get if we make it through to the other side? Things became clearer when I made a pros/cons list. So here's a pros/cons list for the year 2050 where superintelligence occurs. I assume in 2050 we'll have superintelligence far smarter than all humanity combined. I assume a billion humanoid robots. I assume essentially anything can be built given sufficient compute + energy. A 2050 future done poorly: - extreme power concentration in 10 or so tech firms who control compute. Most humans feel powerless, and the same with governments - Authoritarian government gets AI first, overwrites all digital information, no one knows what's true. This government ensures hegemony for centuries - major virus with Ebola death rate + as contagious as Covid wipes out much of mankind. Launched by a suicidal terrorist group, it's designed to not be detectable until a year in - Nuclear war over fear of US establishing permanent superintelligence supremacy. No humans left. Just robots roaming a wasteland earth - Misaligned, self-replicating AI swarm spreads throughout the universe turning all life into datacenters, in order to answer some impossible question on an eval - all the dangers we can't imagine: severe digital addiction, dystopian government structures, etc. A 2050 future done well: - Pristine health: the cure to all major diseases once and for all. No cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, etc. Easy to write this, but imagine it actually happening. We've done it before, we can do it for everything. - Aesthetics: Aging slowed down or reversed. No more acne, hair loss, wrinkles, muscle loss - Beautiful earth: climate change a thing of the past. Solar + wind + fission + fusion. Super clean air everywhere. Robot ships fully clean the oceans. Forest restoration. All life flourishes. - Beautiful cities: robots ensure clean streets, very little crime, stunning buildings built in a couple years, way larger houses, super beautiful walking around - Magical transportation: Jetpacks from house in the woods to the city, hyperloop from nyc to paris in an hour, 5min to anywhere in SF - Space exploration: space elevators for quick trips to moon, fusion rockets and cryosleep for first trips to Alpha Centauri - Discovery: Math and physics discovery accelerates exponentially, dark matter turns out to have wild explanation, aliens detected in patterns of galaxies, consciousness finally understood. - Mental state: drugs without negative side effects help transform the brain into whatever state we want, whether smarter or happier, without any lows or de-motivation. Nothing in physics prevents this. - ^All these good things but for everyone. In an age of abundance, there's no reason anyone to be left behind. AI helps us figure out government and economic structures that are stable for centuries while enabling individual freedom. New information tools keep society fully informed so we can finally run politics as adults. - all the good things we can't imagine: communication with animals, new senses, mind uploading into spacecraft, etc. Don't believe things could get that good? Try explaining our world to a hunter-gatherer from 50,000 BC. Don't believe things could get that bad? Try watching a documentary about 1940 europe. In my current opinion, the pros of superintelligence outweigh the cons, but only if we tread extremely carefully. Whether you agree or not, this transition does seem like it's happening. You may choose to slow it down, prevent it, or accelerate it, but we are all now participants in it. And that brings us back to Labor Day. This transition is going to require an immense amount of human work to go well. AI labs are providing the initial sparks of the transition, but we need all humans to provide the rest of the infrastructure. From AI tooling to thoughtful policy decisions to manufacturing to media to education. Work's going to change for everyone, but there's never before been more work to do for everyone. And looking forward decades, no matter how autonomous AI gets, if we have the right societal structures, then we'll still need many humans to steer that future. Imagine, for ex, in 15 years we want NYC to have underground hyperloop transportation. Sure superintelligence can coordinate it and robots can do the actual building, but humans will be needed to handle all the policy decisions and debates over which loops go where, who controls them, who maintains them. Now multiply that by all the projects we'll want to pursue in parallel across the planet, with limited compute/energy/material resources. There's plenty to be excited about. There's plenty to fear about. But on this labor day, there's no need to feel meaningless. There is and always will be many days of labor ahead of us.

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: