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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Counter example: Kagi.

Kagi has recently moved to new offices in Belgrade. While I like their product we should not forget that serbia is not a free country, there has been massive corruption and russian influence. Even though there are massive protests from time to time, no leadership change has happened.

I don't think the Kagi team has any bad intentions, and most likely they have attended the anti-Vucic protests as well. Moving back to Serbia is an economically wise choice for Kagi as a company.

However, once regime goons show up in Kagi's offices, they will be forced to do whatever the serbian government and by extension putin wants them to do.

Often Kagi gets mentioned alongside Protonmail and related privacy-focused services. But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.

It's a risk we should be aware of and consciously decide to accept when we are using Kagi.

> But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.

CIA vs Putin. Not that different imho.

Your "humble opinion" is totally worthless because your are using false equivalence bias in order to minimize the atrocities and war crimes that putin has committed against Ukraine and the citizens of many other countries including his own.

Are you saying that USA do not commit war crimes? Oh yes that's right, they kill and commit atrocities even without declaring war!

Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.

At one time Google was a niche website, literally orders of magnitude lower than Alta Vista.

With that logic, are you also going to expect Kagi to generate minimum $10B to $35B in revenue a quarter over the next 27 years then, the lifetime of Google's existence?

Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?

No, I don't expect it to be the next Google, nor did my statement imply that. The point was that just because something is small doesn't mean it has to remain small. That is true whether or not Kagi never becomes the biggest.

> Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?

No, I don't.

Thank you for admitting that Kagi is not a viable counter example.

Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to:

> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers

Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.

OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.

> Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.

All of this is true. But I don't understand why you are contesting @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample. Both are true. Kagi is too small. Yes. And Kagi is a counterexample to your original "I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers" claim. You said nothing about being too big or too small in that claim. So @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample is very much on point.

I don't think a seven your old company is a counterexample to the inevitability of anything.

It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.

Someone is showing that they can deliver similar products or services without ads. It’s comparable.

Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.

I think they're saying it's inevitable for billion dollar capitalist companies. /not-s

And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s

Why is that a counter example? Kagi is just providing a convenient access to several language models that might well advertise via API, too.

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