Jeffrey Wang
@wangzjeff
Followers
9K
Following
3K
Media
58
Statuses
1K
cofounder @ExaAILabs prev SPC, Plaid, Harvard
San Francisco
Joined January 2020
I got into Harvard + almost every college I applied to w/ an essay about studying at McDonalds. Had multiple admissions officers write me handwritten letters complimenting me on it. To any frantic high school senior, the best advice I got was - keep in mind that the admissions
309
1K
19K
I think Andrew Huberman may have singlehandedly ruined the SF social scene. More so than ever, seems like people just stand around sober at parties and then go home early.
169
112
4K
Airlines should seat similar age people together to promote meet cute.
29
193
4K
My senior year, I was seeing a girl from MIT and showed her this 6 GPU ML/mining rig I had proudly built. She immediately told me that her ex had a bigger one with 8 GPUs. Can’t even make this stuff up 🫠🫠🫠.
my Harvard dorm room ML/crypto mining setup 😂. 4 1080tis, 2 1070s. Many BERTs trained, many ETHs mined
74
257
3K
this prompt worked for finding the bug, but I will probably be the first person our future AI overlord eternally tortures
102
136
3K
Call me a psycho but whenever I fly into a city, I ask the entire plane if anyone wants to share an Uber. ~50% of the time, I succeed and get to save money, CO2, and maybe make a friend. Personally find it crazy that more people don't do this. Human coordination is so unsolved.
240
73
2K
my Harvard dorm room ML/crypto mining setup 😂. 4 1080tis, 2 1070s. Many BERTs trained, many ETHs mined
117
60
2K
There's something deeply wrong w/ the Huberman/Blueprint/longevity movement. Last night, friend bailed on a good friend's housewarming because they "needed" to go on an early morning run. Life is too short to be a hypochondriac in your 20s. Let's all remember to live.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t need a daily routine. You can eat when you’re hungry, you can sleep when you’re tired, you can drop all commitments if a special opportunity comes up. Wellness podcasters are just promoting a lifestyle for people who can’t make.
164
70
2K
If you live in SF, you'll learn that a group of 50ish MIT girls collectively know everyone important in tech.
51
45
1K
Why SF is the right place to start a company - a tragic, true tale 🌁. > be tech founder, got out of relationship 6 mo. ago.> get Hinge for first time in years, plan first date in a long time with cute girl.> get ghosted 1 hour before date.> now I'm spending the night coding 💪.
62
30
1K
I'm buying Japanese capsule beds as nap pods for our new SF office. If you want to bulk order with me, they should be something like $1000/bed. Please DM me if interested!. Comparable products sold in the US cost like $15K
151
43
1K
Sophomore year at Harvard, my team was first place in a competition that our machine learning class was having, and I was feeling pretty good. Then at 1am, Scott Wu made a few submissions and wrecked us. Best of luck to this amazing team!.
Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer. Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork. Devin is
14
34
997
Cursor/Claude shitposting aside, I don’t think people outside of SF tech circles quite understand just how much more productive certain engineers are becoming with LLMs. AI is becoming not just a tool but a full extension of the human brain and body. Engineers are easily getting.
60
57
958
OpenAI claims GPT4-turbo is “better” than GPT4, but I ran my own tests and don’t think that's true. I benchmarked on SAT reading, which is a nice human reference for reasoning ability. Took 3 sections (67 questions) from an official 2008-2009 test (2400 scale) and got the
87
79
767
3 of my good friends from college are now dating girls from openai, what is going on.
54
7
650
The latest craze in SF is SaaS (standing around absolutely sober).
6
16
544
Job search tip I wish I'd known when I was a college senior:. Don't prioritize sending job apps - just email founders/managers. Way more visibility, and easier to personalize. (as practice, I'm jeff at exa dot ai 😊).
16
10
539
I got early access to the GPTs builder. Some findings:. - Creating a GPT is actually dead simple. You don't even need to write code, the GPT-building GPT is very intelligent and walks you through a multi-step process. - Similar to plugins, "actions" that GPTs can take are HTTP
15
46
526
actual startup life in SF is legitimately more dramatic and interesting than Silicon Valley HBO.
19
26
485
wrong. quant finance.
engineers have the lowest ratio of ambition to talent of any profession.
6
16
484
I (26, male, SF) told a friend that I'd gone on 3 dates in the last year, and she replied "oh wow, that means you've got 10 more dates until you're 30!". and that freaked me out.
24
4
393
Some takeaways from the discussions so far in this Discord of ~80 LLM maniacs 🧵.
25
25
366
Just made "LLM Performance Enthusiasts" - a private Discord for people who are focused on absolutely maximizing LLM performance. There is a lot of noise on Twitter/internet about finetuning X model or using Y technique. What's the common theme? The vast majority of posts are.
395
10
350
I thought I was good at prompt engineering before putting together this group. crazy knowledge being dropped. Again, the goal is to foster the best conversations about absolutely maxing LLM performance, with production in mind. Lemme know if you wanna join!
Just made "LLM Performance Enthusiasts" - a private Discord for people who are focused on absolutely maximizing LLM performance. There is a lot of noise on Twitter/internet about finetuning X model or using Y technique. What's the common theme? The vast majority of posts are.
84
11
341
In the SF startup scene, I've recently heard many people argue that most success comes from "kingmaking" - people with power (e.g., VCs) choose winners and will them to succeed using influence. Wut? Tech is the industry where from its inception and to this day, nerds and.
28
12
306
OpenAI's moat is it not taking 17 clicks to find your API key.
15
14
307
@che4os 9-5ing your way to ~10M net worth with your main recreations being omakase dinners, board game nights, and simping for the 2 girls you know is my idea of hell.
16
14
259
As someone who went there, I know as fact that many Harvard grads with >3.8 GPA suck.
I know heritage American Harvard seniors with >3.8 GPA who don’t have a full time job offer after >30 applications. This is degrading. The social contract has been violated. The system is not working for us, the youth. The boomers betrayed us in their love for cheap foreign.
10
2
247
I know a bunch of o3 level people from Harvard/MIT circles. Most of them are applying their talents towards 9-5ing a quant finance job. Intelligence is not all you need!.
8
3
235
For anything semantic, wayyy better than LinkedIn search itself
We're celebrating Thanksgiving with a full week of launches 🦃. Today - semantic search over LinkedIn. Pick the "LinkedIn profile" category to intelligently search over hundreds of millions of people. Examples below 👇
13
7
227
only in SF will the biggest guy in the gym be wearing a MongoDB t shirt.
8
6
202
Feedback on Grok @elonmusk @TheGregYang :. I used to use Grok every day because I find it to be the least biased LLM. However, my usage has gone to ~0 because it now tries to inform every response with web RAG, which ruins the ability to get pure answers.
18
3
201
If your heart skipped a beat reading the topics below, you're probably a good fit for our LLM community🫡. LLM Performance Enthusiasts is for real talk from the best, nerdiest hackers. If you want an invite code, reply here with an LLM performance tip!
Just made "LLM Performance Enthusiasts" - a private Discord for people who are focused on absolutely maximizing LLM performance. There is a lot of noise on Twitter/internet about finetuning X model or using Y technique. What's the common theme? The vast majority of posts are.
133
5
199
🥳🥳🥳. Mega kudos to all our investors and also the Exa team. Back to building! (and hopefully some sleep).
Announcing our Series A, led by @lightspeedvp, with participation from @nvidia and @ycombinator! 🚀. Exa is an AI lab redesigning search. Funding will help scale our API product, the first search engine built to power LLMs. Today, we’re also launching big product updates: 🧵
22
2
187
I call em like I see em.
actual startup life in SF is legitimately more dramatic and interesting than Silicon Valley HBO.
5
3
172
this wouldn't be necessary if we just had good ol' GPT4 back 😭.
7
0
169
Claude 3 Opus (biggest model) got 2 wrong. That's a perfect 800 🤯.
OpenAI claims GPT4-turbo is “better” than GPT4, but I ran my own tests and don’t think that's true. I benchmarked on SAT reading, which is a nice human reference for reasoning ability. Took 3 sections (67 questions) from an official 2008-2009 test (2400 scale) and got the
2
20
168
the coworking space I'm at in LA has better music than nightclubs in SF.
15
1
165
Sonnet just one-shotted something I set aside 4 hours to work on 😍.
6
1
164
come hack at exa. sat 9/7 in our sf office. good people, food, vibes 😎. apply here -
8
4
160
This is super late, but wtf are people chatting to their PDFs about? Do people have PDF waifus?.
29
7
156
the sf migration cycle:.1. move to sf because you're a technologist+contrarian.2. move out of sf because EVERYONE is a technologist+contrarian (also you can't land a date).3. repeat.
4
0
156
jokes on her now - at @metaphorsystems we have a $1M cluster of A100s :). (if this excites you, DM me 😛).
11
1
148
Our office nap pods have arrived. I’m hosting an open house this Sunday in the Exa SF office so that people can check them out and make orders!. Event link below: ⬇️
I'm buying Japanese capsule beds as nap pods for our new SF office. If you want to bulk order with me, they should be something like $1000/bed. Please DM me if interested!. Comparable products sold in the US cost like $15K
14
3
145
git commit -m 'unexpected date behavior, edge case now handled'.
0
0
115
Grateful to be absorbing a ton of knowledge from the biggest LLM nerds I’ve ever met on Discord. It’s too much so I'll try to post about just one topic a day. Today is maxing speed in LLM APIs:.
11
5
116
me: I met my cofounder will in 2015, during freshman orientation. harvard student: oh damn, I was 10 years old in 2015. me:
2
0
115
In case it wasn't clear from the fact that BERT and also ETH mining are antiquated, this is from a while ago (2017).
4
0
107
this group basically runs tech - they are the tech illuminati.
2
1
110
@Jamesthesnake maybe. last stint I did in SF was when I was a new grad. but is mid twenties really that different from early twenties?.
11
0
104
@xhfloz 🙌. If you want to help us crawl, train novel search models, organize the web, check out :).
3
0
107
I'm insanely bullish on AI startups disrupting incumbents. Why?. I've done a ton of SaaS shopping recently. Startups have no baggage - can make product fully AI-first, which is often the right decision. Incumbent products feel like AI was added as an afterthought.
17
11
104
@brianryhuang I think it's more that a lot of these people are embarrassed that they've chosen a profession that wastes their talent and is by definition a zero sum game?.
5
0
100
San Francisco is the most underrated city in the US. In the 1800s, it was America’s America, the frontier of the frontier, where the most adventurous embarked to seek fortune and opportunity. In the 1960s, it was the epicenter of the hippie movement, which forever shaped.
18
5
98
Didn’t think this was how I was gonna make frontpage of TechCrunch in my lifetime.
With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back
5
0
96
10/18 - Exa Day!. HMU below if you want some of this schwag 😎
23
2
93
looking for a place to crash in NYC, 12/28 to 1/2!. can pay. (I used to crash with my homies but they're all cuffed now 😭).
6
2
92
Exa is super powerful - vector search over the web is just the first step on a quest to build the best search tech out there. But before today, it was mainly in the hands of mega nerds + devs. Websets changes that because it's a super useful LLM product built on top of our.
Announcing Exa Websets - a breakthrough toward perfect web search. Sign up for the waitlist below👇
8
3
90
@natanielruizg I completely agree! not everyone has to drink. but if you don't, you better not be boring :p.
3
1
88
It's honestly an environmental disaster that people don't do this.
11
1
83
Hit me up with some queries. Currently works best with people, companies, papers, but try me.
Announcing Exa Websets - a breakthrough toward perfect web search. Sign up for the waitlist below👇
32
1
87
Sad that tech Twitter is dunking on hardware left and right. If anything, people working on hardware should be positively gaslit b/c it's so important but also so hard.
8
3
85
@lailachima 😂. I think it's actually healthier, was gonna go to a bar and now I'm drinkin' sparkling water :).
4
0
79
I hate it when you ask a friend in a relationship “how are you?” and the reply is "We've been doing well", as if they're not an individual human. but I just caught myself saying just that, except referring to me and my cofounder. FML.
4
1
80
@TrevorCampbell_ yeah - fun fact, if you don't feed GPUs protein powder, `nvidia-smi` will show lower and lower max wattages.
1
0
76
oversized exa shirts at career fair, so that gen Zs feel comfortable approaching us. Harvey Mudd, come say hi!
5
1
78
🤯 I prompt hacked ChatGPT and found out that they've launched fast browsing, using a cached version of Bing. Prior to today, ChatGPT browsing supported the following functions:.`search`, `click`, `back`, `scroll`, `open_url`, and `quote_lines`. These are actions for controlling
6
7
69
In SF, personal life and professional life blend without warning. Often a delight, often a nightmare.
6
0
68
@caitlinner Before COVID, I never went to parties where over half the people were not even holding a drink. Nowadays, this is typical for me. People don't even pretend to drink by sipping a white claw over the course of a few hours.
1
0
65
Couldn't be more excited about what we're building at M̶e̶t̶a̶p̶h̶o̶r̶ Exa! New contents features should be super useful for any AI app that needs access to high quality information. Also if you're considering a rebrand, heads up that it will probably take 5 years off your life.
Announcing big changes to Metaphor:. 1. We’re releasing a suite of content retrieval features using new models trained for RAG. 2. We’re renaming to Exa to reflect our mission. 3. We’ve revamped our UI 🎉. Altogether, we're taking big steps toward "search over knowledge": 🧵
8
2
67
ok, I think I might have jinxed it.
actual startup life in SF is legitimately more dramatic and interesting than Silicon Valley HBO.
6
1
62
Why are QR code menus still a thing? I ask for a physical menu at every restaurant because 0% of meals should start with a bunch of people hunched over their phones.
8
7
60
pretty crazy that openai has let anthropic have a lead for over a month now. enough time for me to start saying "ask claude" instead of "ask gpt4".
8
0
62
Had 2 bad physical therapists in a row, so I'm now using o1 pro mode instead
10
1
62
Unphased by reports of the Vision Pro's weight. I am committed to developing a strong, thick neck.
3
1
57
Why is Hackernews obsessed w/ dunking on new tech + cherishing old tech? Might as well rename to Boomernews.
5
1
57
our new swag 😍. DM me if you want some!.
5
0
54
GPT4 prompting:.- Extremely lengthy, sophisticated outlines that force extreme levels of "chain of thought" are being used to squeeze out performance. An example is
1
1
56
Airlines could become dating apps. - Opt in to United Dating, swipe.on people on your flight.- Meet before boarding for a quick date. Maybe one person even takes the other to a lounge.- Sit together on plane (maybe offer ability to opt out if airport portion doesn’t go well).-.
Airlines should seat similar age people together to promote meet cute.
8
0
55
I think the "body" part is underrated because the "intelligent autocomplete" aspect of Copilot/Cursor are legitimate repetitive stress injury preventers for engineers.
1
0
55
🫡. Calling all hackers, if you're building something with Exa, we're happy to support you with any free credits! Just shoot me a message, or email jeff@exa.ai.
it's finals week at stanford but i want to build something with @ExaAILabs 🙄. maybe during spring break.
1
3
53
Structured output is still very hard. Solutions:.- Finetune (projects like Jsonformer .- Use formats that perform best for particular models. For example, Claude does best on YAML.- Make life easier using ergonomic libraries like
3
2
53
💡 Slack is positioned as a great interface for interacting w/ AI agents. -All your "chats" in one location.-Super familiar UI.-Great shortcuts.-Analogy of "agent" to "person".-Existing API integrations.One limitation though is no text streaming (rn). Anyone build this?.
25
2
52
Y'all keep asking me how much $ I made from running 6 GPUs in my dorm room. - Full setup was ~$4600.- I was VERY cheap when buying parts and bought GPUs before market got hot (2017).- Electricity was free, so pure profit.- I made something between $4600 and Harvard tuition :)
my Harvard dorm room ML/crypto mining setup 😂. 4 1080tis, 2 1070s. Many BERTs trained, many ETHs mined
6
1
52
It would get so hot in my room that for 2 years, I used my window as a thermostat.
4
0
50
@daniel_petri1 Europe is waking up haha. Unfortunately this is impossible/extremely inconvenient in many if not most American cities.
1
0
46
Did not expect to get demand for 100+ units. Here's the plan everyone - I ordered some with express shipping arriving in 2 weeks, will test them out and then figure out logistics for a big order after I'm assured of the quality!.
I'm buying Japanese capsule beds as nap pods for our new SF office. If you want to bulk order with me, they should be something like $1000/bed. Please DM me if interested!. Comparable products sold in the US cost like $15K
6
1
49