The Assistant product is incredible. It's been my daily driver (+Cursor), since September. I don't even bother with normal search results unless I really can't find something (like a specific GitHub issue that hasn't been cached yet)
Is the assistant similar to perplexity? Or something different?
It's basically Perplexity, but in some ways better. I'll edit my comment to make that more clear.
It's more similar to chatgpt search. E.g. it does real time search and gets the AI to summarize/rank/interpret the results for you.
Not true. It's a full fledged LLM aggregator.
Here's Anthropic's answer to the most important question of all time, served by Kagi Assistant (with the correct answer).
https://share.cleanshot.com/xB7W8mwD