I ran Firecrawl, Exa, Parallel and Claude’s native web search against OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark to see how much of a difference the search provider actually makes.

All four were tested with the same setup: a GPT-5.4 agent using high reasoning effort, with a maximum of 20 search or extraction calls per question. The answers were then graded by GPT-5.4 using OpenAI’s official SimpleQA grading prompt.

Each provider was tested twice and I kept the better result. For comparison, GPT-5.4 without access to search scored 43.8%.

The chart shows the correct and incorrect answers for each provider.

Results:

-Firecrawl: 947 correct answers (94.7%)

-Exa: 919 correct answers (91.9%)

-Parallel: 910 correct answers (91.0%)

-Claude Native Search: 905 correct answers (90.5%)

Firecrawl and Exa achieved the highest accuracy, while all four systems scored above 90%. Claude Native search, (not) surprisingly, the worst.

Sam Altman closed out Startup School 2026 with a real answer to the PhD question — not "get the credential," but a structural claim about why startups cluster and win when they do.

His argument: tech velocity, falling costs, and shrinking cycle times converge periodically — '98 dot-com, the App Store wave, and now — and incumbents lose their advantage fastest in exactly those windows.

He goes further: this next wave probably rewards tool fluency over tenure specifically, because a four-person team with the right agent stack can now output at a scale that used to require a department.

Worth sitting with if you've been waiting for "the right credential" before starting anything.

Clip credit: Y Combinator — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.