chief economist @exaailabs, prev econ/cs phd at harvard and research at chainlink
SF
Joined January 2012
- Tweets65
- Following3.1K
- Followers1K
- Likes13.6K
Dan Moroz retweeted
Some of the most powerful communicators in Silicon Valley are economists and researchers by training.
@arakharazian, @tamarawinter... @dmoroz joins a great crew and I predict we'll see more of these roles emerge at startups moving forward.
Excited to share that I joined Exa a few months ago as chief economist.
I met @WilliamBryk and @jeffzwang when they were undergrads, and it’s a great adventure to join them in the AI search space after years of following along.
A big part of my phd was on oracle design, and a fun realization for me was that Exa was like an oracle for AIs. When an AI is unsure about something, it uses a search tool like Exa. And as the search tool for products like Devin, Cursor, and Legora, we have a rare vantage point on this frontier.
Today we launch Exa Snapshot which lets anyone query our historical web index. It has critical applications in RL model training, AI forecasting, backtesting, reproducible LLM evaluation, etc. If you’re interested in using us for any of that, or if you’re working on related research, please dm.
Excited to share that I joined Exa a few months ago as chief economist.
I met @WilliamBryk and @jeffzwang when they were undergrads, and it’s a great adventure to join them in the AI search space after years of following along.
A big part of my phd was on oracle design, and a fun realization for me was that Exa was like an oracle for AIs. When an AI is unsure about something, it uses a search tool like Exa. And as the search tool for products like Devin, Cursor, and Legora, we have a rare vantage point on this frontier.
Today we launch Exa Snapshot which lets anyone query our historical web index. It has critical applications in RL model training, AI forecasting, backtesting, reproducible LLM evaluation, etc. If you’re interested in using us for any of that, or if you’re working on related research, please dm.
Dan Moroz retweeted
Stripe -> Financial infra
OpenAI -> Intelligence infra
xAI -> Compute infra
Exa -> Information infra
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.
I spent hours during my phd fighting the search box, looking for papers where I knew the flavor of result but couldn't remember the title or authors. Finally we have a new kind of lens
Today's release gives any AI agent SoTA retrieval over 300m+ research papers.
Traditional tools like Google Scholar have very low recall -- you'll always have FOMO about papers you missed. Exa Publications fixes that.
You or your agent can now be comprehensive about things like:
- "research published in 2026 on training web-search agents with RL"
- "foundational work on using Floquet engineering to create topological phases in ultracold atoms"
- "papers from the 1970s examining whether dietary cholesterol wouldn't harm primate arteries"
This required careful tuning on the index and retrieval side -- ingesting 300m+ research papers + 30m authors, large-scale OCR over pdfs, finetuning embeddings for complex queries, and some knowledge graph algorithms.
We're methodically structuring the world's information for agents. First companies, then people, then code, now research papers, and soon many other sources of data.
Pundits today are critically lacking skin in the game. This is the future
Only after talking with Will and Jeff a couple years ago did I realize how tightly Google restricted its search queries. It’s hard to get more than 10 blue links at a time because that throttling is what keeps the ad click revenue flowing. Agents need to do orders of magnitude more searches with orders of magnitude more results per search.
Exa has been building that vision for 5 years, incredible foresight and well deserved win. Congrats @williambryk and @jeffzwang!
Exa raised $250M at a $2.2B valuation, led by a16z, to continue organizing the web for agents:
- Exa now serves search to Cursor, Cognition, Openrouter, 5000+ other companies, 500k+ developers
- We’re SOTA in many important verticals (code, companies, people, news, more very soon)
- We make agents smarter and cheaper by returning 90% less text with little to no tradeoff in RAG quality
- We’re building out web agents that are Pareto optimal on price x performance x latency, possible because we own our search stack fully end to end
We used to tell candidates that without innovation in search, we may live in a world where we have both AGI and fake news. Funnily enough, I think that we’ve now been living in such a world for quite some time. With this funding, we should be able to dramatically improve the state of information in society.
🚀🚀🚀
Big win for @Deloitte. Matt and team are deep thinkers and talented builders in the crazy world of crypto infra. The Institutions are here. Congrats @mcutler!
Proud of this sharp team building the future of DeFi (and Fi)
a year ago @contrarianmarco and i sketched something on a piece of paper and called it "phase two." today it's live!
this launch is the biggest one in ostium's protocol history so far. it's the first time onchain perps connect to traditional markets.
thankful to our institutional partners and super proud of the killer team we've assembled, particularly over the last 4 months, to make this happen.
we've come a long way from the nerdy college kids who started ostium out of my dorm room - here's marco and me the day we got our first check! and yes, he wore collared shirts even then, although now he wears a suit and tie every single day without fail :)
Dan Moroz retweeted
D² is dedicated to research on how protocols work, why they behave the way they do, and how they can be designed better
The schedule is now live, with talks spanning:
→ DeFi Microstructure
→ Perpetual Futures & Derivatives
→ Mechanism Design
→ Prediction Markets
→ AMMs