Max Buckley

Head of Knowledge Research and Zurich Site Lead at Exa. Previously spent 12.5 years at Google.

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Well would you look at that🇨🇭. @ExaAILabs is all registered!

https://t.co/CDBDae0LOM

[Boris @BorisMeinardus]

What is it like to work at a cutting-edge AI startup?

@MaxWBuckley joined @ExaAILabs to open and lead the Zurich office, which involves traveling around the world, interviewing 400+ candidates for 2 open ML roles, and much more.

I’ve also been exploring the AI startup world from the other side of the globe, flying from Tokyo to SF, then to Rio, and back.

First time SF.

First time ICLR in Rio.

All of these exciting developments lead to fun stories, anecdotes, and learnings, which we share in the latest episode of Signal & Stories!

Check it out!

https://t.co/a55F8D15Cc

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

The latest episode of „Signal and Stories“ is out!

Myself and @BorisMeinardus discuss lessons learned, travelling to SF, the incredible startup culture there, attending ML conferences, life advice when interviewing, and much more.

https://t.co/JAjZGIpiDb

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Upcoming Seoul trip (June/July), looking for speaking opportunities 🇰🇷

I will be visiting South Korea from Saturday June 27th to Sunday July 12th, primarily for the ICML conference. I would love to present at some meetup/event/company/university/whatever during my trip. Happy to give a talk on any/all of the awesome things we are building at Exa, insights on vibe coding at the frontier, information retrieval research, odd career paths, or whatever else I know anything about.

If you know anyone in Seoul interested in hosting me, please tag them. If you have a decently sized South Korean ML/AI audience, please repost. Greatly appreciated, and hope to meet you there!

Learn more about Exa at ICML: https://t.co/rAOidTg26i

To sign up to learn more about Exa's events at ICML, see here: https://t.co/BeeZsm6qDU

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Great read on the state of the vibe!

[Alexander Terenin @avt_im]

Today's conventional wisdom often says agentic coding works best for slop - think 500k lines of Python.

Let me challenge that: in two days, I built the code equivalent of fragile glass - a concurrent hash table in CUDA. And it's faster than Nvidia's!

New blog post - link below!

[Exa @ExaAILabs]

We raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.2B valuation, led by a16z.

Exa is a search lab organizing the web's data for agents.

[ATP @ATPinsights]

The shift from search engine to knowledge engine is already underway, according to @MaxWBuckley, head of knowledge research at @ExaAILabs.

Traditional search returns 10 links. What most people actually want is an answer. Max explains that AI now makes it possible to go much further in that direction, giving users a direct response rather than a list of loosely relevant URLs.

The model Exa is building toward is not purely either/or. In the near term, the system can deliver both an answer and supporting links at minimal additional cost. Over time, as users build trust in the results, they may rely on the answer alone and skip the links entirely. In either case, answers come with citations so users know exactly where the information came from.

The practical argument is straightforward. When someone needs a specific fact, such as a single official URL for a government arrival form, sorting through search results introduces uncertainty. A direct answer with a clear source removes that friction entirely.

[Nehal @NehallAgrawal]

🛑[LIVE] on day 2 of @aiDotEngineer 🇸🇬

@MaxWBuckley, head of knowledge research at @ExaAILabs on what comes next in how “IT literacy” is evolving.

from learning rigid syntax to learning how to direct intelligent systems, we’re in for a ride.

[YJ Soon @yjsoon]

This talk by @MaxWBuckley from @ExaAILabs at @aiDotEngineer SG was like freaking catnip for me. I’ve been trying to get this message across to teachers and gov folks for a year and Max just spoke about it all so engagingly and eloquently. Thank you so much kind sir.

[ATP @ATPinsights]

Excited to have @MaxWBuckley Head of Knowledge Research at @ExaAILabs, joining us on @ATPinsights this Saturday at 4:40pm, live from @aiDotEngineer Singapore!

Max is working on how AI can change the way we search for and understand information.

We will explore what he is building at Exa and why the next generation of search engines will look completely different from what we have today.

Make sure to follow @ATPinsights, and we will see you on Saturday 🚀

[Leo Boytsov @srchvrs]

🧵A paper by Yu-Ang Lee and colleagues showed that vanilla LORA is likely as good as other variants given that you select a proper learning rate (and possibly other parameters). On a related note, there are hundreds or possibly thousands alternatives to the Adam optimizer. ↩️

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

I stumbled upon this excellent post by @salykova_ on writing, optimizing, and benchmarking kernels for Nvidia GPUs https://t.co/nu4LxNmYLu

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

The things I do for NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage

[Sherry Jiang is at ai engineer singapore @SherryYanJiang]

so excited to have @MaxWBuckley speaking at @aiDotEngineer singapore - he's the head of knowledge research at @ExaAILabs

now working on applied ai research and info retrieval for ai agents, after spending 12.5 years at google.

learn more about his talk and other speakers at: https://t.co/13SQyOwilT

@swyx @ivanleomk @agrimsingh @unprofeshme @aimuggle

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Is Claude flirting with me?

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Everytime I

claude --dangerously-skip-permissions

I think of this: https://t.co/fKMfVAlnb1

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Nicolay Gerold is the Juggernaut of AI, a regular human empowered by the deity Cyttorak, becoming a literal human juggernaut. He possesses superhuman strength and durability, and is virtually immune to most physical attacks. In his day job he is an entrepreneur, AI engineer and podcaster based in Germany.

It was a pleasure hosting Nicolay on the Signal and Stories podcast alongside my cohost @BorisMeinardus. We talked startups in Germany, OpenClaw, coding agents, and much more. Check it out!

New Podcast Episode: https://t.co/651e2JHpsF

[Max Buckley @MaxWBuckley]

Exa Zurich is now hiring ML Research Engineers and Systems Engineers!

Have you got a very particular set of skills?

Are you an outstanding ML mage, or a systems engineering paladin looking to join a party to take on harder content and level up?

We're building the search engine for the AI age — a neural search engine with its own independent index, purpose-built for AI agents. We're growing fast, the problems are hard, and the team is cracked.

Open to living in Zurich, Switzerland?

Bonus points if your skill tree is specced into: machine learning, search, natural language processing, and/or low-level GPU/CUDA optimisation.

⚠️ Warning: these are extremely high agency roles. You will be expected and empowered to take action from your very first day. History waits for no one!

Apply now: https://t.co/QjLzMDysGF

[Will Bryk @WilliamBryk]

We booked a whole IMAX theater in SF for the premiere of "Project Hail Mary".

We have room for 250 people. Join to see how to save the world from impending doom, link below 👇

[Will Bryk @WilliamBryk]

Excited that several Google researchers have launched Exa's new Zurich research office!

They'll focus on exploring wild new web-scale retrieval methods.

If you want to redesign how search works with mountains in the background: exa․ai/careers