Benjamin Chan

Research @ExaAILabs building the best embedding models in the world. | prev phd @cornell_cs

[Exa @ExaAILabs]

@sarahdingwang @benchmark @lightspeedvp @ycombinator @ScottWu46 @ibab @talbroda And lastly, thank you to all Exa users and friends who've been with us these past 5 years.

We will not stop until the world’s information is fully organized for you, and for every intelligence across the world 🫡

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@_patrickogrady @Thomas_S_Kim Congrats! it looks awesome :)

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@kartik1507 @soubhik_deb @ittaia btw will you be turning this into a paper? It seems neat to make catching-up in simplex more communication-efficient.

philosophically it's a tradeoff between simplicity of liveness<->complexity of dealing with lost messages.

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

The protocol is dear to me; it's so elegant, fast, easy.

I maintain that one day Simplex Consensus will be the byzantine protocol of choice everywhere (industry, in distributed systems classes).

https://t.co/vKXA0BEFvp

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

Excited to see Simplex powering practical onchain payments!

[Georgios Konstantopoulos @gakonst]

We'll be talking more about this but TL;DR Tempo runs Commonware's variant of Simplex using threshold sigs, which unlocks primitives:
- secure randomness
- threshold enc/decryption
- random next leader election
- simple bridges to other chains
- offline tx verification

[Exa @ExaAILabs]

Introducing Exa 2.1

We scaled our pre-training and test-time compute by an order of magnitude, unlocking frontier search API performance for both fast and agentic search.

Deep dive below:

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

what a time to be here

[Exa @ExaAILabs]

Introducing Exa 2.0

Breakthroughs in our AI research and engineering have enabled us to build both the fastest search API (<350ms) and the highest quality search on the market.

Product and technical deep dive below:

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@qrazhan_ultd @B_Chou hello prashan! :)

[Ittai Abraham @ittaia]

Decentralized thoughts on 2 round BFT in Simplex style

With @ElodinStorm and Ling Ren

https://t.co/jluSVN7nMU

[Abhinav Kukreja @kukreja_abhinav]

Eshan Chattopadhyay is the latest Godel prize winner!

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

The underlying consensus is based on Simplex Consensus! It's pretty cool to see.

https://t.co/iPcachCUYF

[Anza @anza_xyz]

1/ Introducing the largest Solana Protocol change ever: Alpenglow, Solana's new consensus protocol conceived by the Anza Research team. Say goodbye to Tower BFT and Proof of History. Say hello to Votor & Rotor 🧵👇

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@yupi_asa @_patrickogrady @AndrewLewisPye @Tim_Roughgarden We can also deploy Simplex in an Algorand-like setting, it is essentially a drop-in replacement for their underlying permissioned protocol (https://t.co/34GHD7oNpd)

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@_patrickogrady @samlafer This is so awesome 🙇‍♂️

[patrickogrady.xyz @_patrickogrady]

Unlike other “off-the-shelf” consensus implementations, consensus::simplex is refreshingly minimal.

It delivers simple agreement over opaque “blobs”. Functions that have historically motivated developers to create forks, like block broadcast, are abstracted as interfaces:

[patrickogrady.xyz @_patrickogrady]

Today, we are excited to share our biggest release yet: consensus::simplex (our first of many upcoming consensus dialects).

consensus::simplex provides BFT agreement via a new, optimistically responsive construction inspired by Simplex Consensus:

https://t.co/SwSYfEfsWW

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@nickthehabsfan how much of the increased offense is due to increased time on ice? He's seems like he's always on the ice (and do the OHL and NCAA even track TOI?)

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@mumen_rider99 @nickthehabsfan I second this request

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@yoavgo @BlancheMinerva Not super sure I understand, because we can always run a randomized verifier many times to amplify its success probability; or are you looking for problems where, with some probability over some distribution of instances, there is no “good” verifier at all?

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@yoavgo @discobordism Concretely this most reminds me of verifiers for zero-knowledge for 3-coloring/etc, or as another example the pcp theorem via gap amplification

[Benjamin Chan @Vervious]

@QuangVDao Doesn't plain model mean no trusted setup? I presume your protocol needs a crs