Hello World: ExAI is Open
We started as a group chat. Now we're an open collective shipping AI tools in public. Here's why we built ExAI, what we believe, and what's coming next.
Every meaningful project starts with a simple question. Ours was: why is it so hard to just build things with AI together?
Not research. Not papers. Not demos that live in notebooks. Real tools, shipped in public, built by people who are genuinely curious — not chasing credentials.
That question became a group chat. The group chat became late-night hacking sessions. The sessions became Extracurricular AI.
Why we exist
The AI space moves fast. Faster than any one person can keep up with. But the tooling, the communities, and the culture around AI often lag behind — gated behind expensive API credits, closed research groups, or communities that implicitly require you to already know everything before you’re welcome.
We think that’s backwards.
The best way to understand a technology is to use it — to break it, rebuild it, and share what you learned. That’s how the best engineers work. That’s how the best communities grow.
ExAI is built on that belief.
What we shipped first
Our first public project is Open Deep Research — an open replication of OpenAI’s Deep Research capability. It runs multi-agent pipelines in the background, streams results in real time, and does it all with a lightweight Preact UI.
We built it fast. We shipped it open. We learned a lot along the way — about agentic systems, about streaming architectures, about what “good enough to ship” actually means.
That’s the whole point.
What we believe
We’re not trying to be the next AI lab. We’re not trying to compete with anyone. We’re just trying to create a space where curious builders can show up, build something real, and make it public.
A few things we hold as non-negotiable:
Everything is open source. No paywalls, no private repos, no “enterprise edition.” If we build it, you can read it, fork it, and improve it.
Learning happens in public. We share our mistakes as readily as our wins. A half-finished project with a good writeup is worth more than a polished demo with no explanation.
Everyone belongs here. You don’t need a CS degree, a job at a big lab, or a thousand GitHub stars. If you’re curious and willing to ship, you’re one of us.
Free forever. Our tools stay free. The community stays open. That’s the deal — today and always.
What’s coming
We’re just getting started. Here’s what we’re thinking about next:
- More open research replications — there’s a lot of interesting work to build on
- Community project proposals — we want ExAI to be a place where your ideas get built
- Learning resources — writeups, breakdowns, and post-mortems from everything we ship
- A blog (you’re reading it) — where we think out loud about what we’re building and why
Join us
You don’t need an invitation. You don’t need to apply. You just need to show up.
Browse our GitHub. Open an issue. Fork a repo. Start a discussion. Or just say hi.
The door is always open.
— The ExAI Team