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Setup Guide 03

AI Credentials & Keys

Authorizing your tools to speak to the Intelligence Grid.

1. Google AI Studio (Free)

Access Gemini Pro models for free for prototyping.

1Sign In

Go to aistudio.google.com and sign in with Google.

2Get Key

Click "Get API Key" on the top left. Create a key in a new project. Copy this key to a safe place (like a Notepad file) for now.


2. Perplexity (Deep Web Research)

For deep web research capabilities and citations.

1Settings

Go to User Settings → API.

2Generate

Add a payment method (credits) if needed, and generate an API key.


3. Semantic Scholar (Academic Graph)

For autonomous literature review and citation graphing.

2Request

Click "Request API Key". You may need to sign in. The free tier is sufficient for our workshop labs.


4. Tavily (Real-Time Web Search for Agents)

Tavily gives your AI agents the ability to search the web in real-time, extract content, and ground their responses in live data. It is free for students.

1Sign Up

Go to app.tavily.com and create a free account.

2Get Your API Key

Once signed in, your API key is available on the dashboard. Copy it to your secure notes.

3Student Plan

Tavily offers a free student plan with generous limits. Visit tavily.com/pricing and scroll to the "Free for students" section to verify your eligibility.

Why Tavily? When you build agentic workflows, your agents will need to search the web for real-time information. Tavily is purpose-built for this: it returns clean, structured content that agents can reason over, not raw HTML. Major platforms (OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain) integrate with Tavily natively.

5. Exa (Neural Web Search for Agents)

Exa uses neural embeddings to search the web by meaning, not just keywords. It finds exactly what your agents need, even for nuanced queries. Free tier: 1,000 requests/month.

1Sign Up

Go to dashboard.exa.ai and create a free account.

2Get Your API Key

Your API key is available on the dashboard once you sign in. Copy it to your secure notes.

Why Exa? Exa complements Tavily. While Tavily excels at real-time keyword search, Exa uses semantic embeddings to find content by meaning. This is powerful for research queries like "companies working on satellite-based carbon monitoring" where exact keywords may not exist. Exa also offers an MCP server for direct agent integration, and Cursor uses Exa for its code search.

Understanding "Keys"

An API Key is like a credit card number for software. NEVER share it. If an agent asks for your key, paste it in, but never upload it to a public GitHub repository.

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