Entrepreneurs First Retreat, Paris

Yongkang Zou · 2025-10-07 · hackathon · LLM Infrastructure

One finalist, one third place, and one first place. That is quite a way to end the week.

After two exhausting hackathons, I attended the Builders Retreat in Paris. Entrepreneurs First and Anthropic hosted the event in a beautiful villa. I had the privilege of meeting talented people from diverse backgrounds and exchanging ideas all weekend.

Reinventing Deep Research

I ended up teaming up with Carlo Esposito and Rodrigo Tari on a new project. We decided to rethink how deep research is conducted.

Eyed Search generating an executive summary for a complex query.

Typically, a thorough deep research process takes anywhere from 15 to 40 minutes. We cut that down to just 2 to 3 minutes while maintaining the exact same quality. Running a full research pass in a fraction of the usual time completely changes the experience.

Our search engine runs on a Language Diffusion Model. This architecture specifically avoids the hallucination issues you often see with typical Transformer-based LLMs. It relies on a diffusion process to generate accurate and cited content.

The Team Behind the Speed

Huge credit goes to Carlo. He built his own company from scratch and kept surprising us with new talents every 10 minutes. The execution speed of this team was incredible.

You can try the search engine yourself and see the final structured output ready for reading at search.eyed.to.

A million thanks to all the brilliant people I talked with this weekend. Special thanks to the organizers for hosting such an inspiring event: Benoit Dubief, Antoine Duchein, Aurelien Gittard, Mila Ruiz, Sacha Profeta, and especially Charles Weber for the invitation.

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