> That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.

Real businesses aren't doing stuff like this.

It's the home users who use LLMs as a hobby. Some power users pay for Exa and other services. A lot of home LLM users will go to unbelievable lengths to not pay for anything that isn't hardware. Seeing what your agent can do is half the fun for them.

Set one of them against a goal and tell it to not bother you until it has the answer. They will do some weird things as they go.