No Priors Ep. 8 | With Neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy

For the first time in decades web search might be at risk for disruption. Bing is allied with OpenAI to integrate LLMs. Google has committed to launching new products. New startups are emerging. Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded the challenger AI-powered, private search platform Neeva in 2019. He is a former 16-year Google veteran who most recently led the internet’s most profitable business as SVP in charge of Google Ads, Commerce and Privacy. Sridhar, Elad and Sarah talk about the challenge of building search, how LLMs have changed the landscape, and how chatbots and "answer services" will affect web publishers. 00:00 - Introduction 01:32 - Why Sridhar started a private search engine after leaving Google 11:11 - Information Retrieval Problems, Mapping Search Queries and LLMs 15:25 - Google and Bing’s approach to search with LLMs 19:06 - Scale challenges when building a search engine startup 22:26 - Distribution challenges and why they release Neeva Gist 24:11 - Why Neeva is a privacy centric subscription service 28:25 - The relationship between search and publishers/content creators 30:16 - Sridhar’s predictions on how AI will disrupt current ecosystems

Sarah GuohostSridhar RamaswamyguestElad Gilhost

Apr 25, 202335mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: April 25, 2023
Duration: 35m
Channel: No Priors
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

For the first time in decades web search might be at risk for disruption. Bing is allied with OpenAI to integrate LLMs. Google has committed to launching new products. New startups are emerging. Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded the challenger AI-powered, private search platform Neeva in 2019. He is a former 16-year Google veteran who most recently led the internet’s most profitable business as SVP in charge of Google Ads, Commerce and Privacy. Sridhar, Elad and Sarah talk about the challenge of building search, how LLMs have changed the landscape, and how chatbots and "answer services" will affect web publishers. 00:00 - Introduction 01:32 - Why Sridhar started a private search engine after leaving Google 11:11 - Information Retrieval Problems, Mapping Search Queries and LLMs 15:25 - Google and Bing’s approach to search with LLMs 19:06 - Scale challenges when building a search engine startup 22:26 - Distribution challenges and why they release Neeva Gist 24:11 - Why Neeva is a privacy centric subscription service 28:25 - The relationship between search and publishers/content creators 30:16 - Sridhar’s predictions on how AI will disrupt current ecosystems

SPEAKERS

Sarah Guo
host
Sridhar Ramaswamy
guest
Elad Gil
host

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Sridhar Ramaswamy, No Priors Ep. 8 | With Neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy explores neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy on Reinventing Search With AI Answers Sridhar Ramaswamy discusses why he left Google to build Neeva, a privacy-focused, ad-free search engine that later pivoted to AI-powered answer experiences. He explains how large language models (LLMs) unlocked scalable, cited summaries that fundamentally improve search versus traditional lists of links. The conversation dives into the technical and economic challenges of marrying LLMs with information retrieval, from cost and infrastructure to model selection and retrieval-augmented generation. They also explore distribution hurdles, business models, and how AI answers may reshape the relationship between search engines, advertisers, and content publishers.

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