Honestly, I just want my money to be used to improve good old match-keywords-against-index search.
> A common misconception is that AI is more expensive than search. Opposite is true - performing a search is 100x-1000x more expensive than doing an interaction with AI.
> A single search is about ~ 1.5 cents (probably bit less these days, but general ballpark)
> A small AI model can generate a lot of tokens for the same price
> To put this in perspective, 1.5 cents of Gemini Flash usage:
> 50,000 input tokens ≈ 37,500 words (roughly 75-150 pages of text) or 6,000 output tokens ≈ 4,500 words (roughly 9-18 pages of text)
> That is A LOT of information for the cost of just 1 search.
> It may be counter-intuitive but that is how it is. If someone is using AI to answer common questions, learn about a concept, do a quick brainstorm or a translation - instead of searching - our cost is (much) lower.
> So if anything, having AI lowers our cost, not increases it. This is why when we added access to AI models to Pro tier we didn't increase the price.
Thank you.
I wish they’d separated them from the start because I knew immediately that my subscription (where I don’t use Assistant) was going to subsidise subscriptions that do. Now I don’t know what the right thing for them to do is, given they’ve been marketing Assistant as a feature.
(Gather 'round, kids: used to be, questions of utter trivia like the exact ages of actors or whatever didn't even take root in our minds in the first place, we didn't even feel the itch to answer them to begin with, because it was far more effort to answer them than it was worth, unless it was a topic you cared enough about to have a bunch of books about it on-hand, so such questions would usually fall out of our brains before we even consciously engaged with them. Our heads were a lot less noisy then. It was very nice.)
I was running away from the constant shoving of AI features by google, so most of their landing page advertising AI related stuff wasn't really selling it for me.
Totally anecdotal evidence, of course, but I'm sure I'm not the only one dropping off the funnel for that reason.
I just don't want Kagi to get enshittified. If everybody and their dog are focusing on AI, good-old search becomes a vanishing product space which definitely still has its place in the AI era, when you want determinism from your search.
The Kagi team should focus on the core product; that’s what I’m paying for. I stopped being a ProtonMail customer once they began chasing side projects instead of polishing their actual offering. I hope Kagi doesn't go down that same route.
If they increase the prices, well then my Kagi subscription is gone and I will move on. I'm a happy user for noe but I think search wuality has gotten worse lately and I'm more often using the AI instead of search because search just does not bring any good results anymore.
I don’t need a new browser. I don’t need a replacement for Google Maps, since Google Maps is actually good and Kagi will never even catch up to Apple Maps. I don’t need any AI trash.
Just have everybody work on the search engine to make it is faster, more reliable, and free of content farms or slop. That is the only reason I’m paying for Kagi.
Discussed at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46716806
I'd rather that too. Kagi should try to curate like a Librarian and not some kind of oracle. They're not going to capture people with offering AI assistants. They will capture people by filtering out all the garbage places like Google throw into their results to get ad dollars.
I don't know if they're arrogant to consider themselves the main customer base, but I don't think it's an unfair assumption, either.
Kagi was almost advertised to me as what Google used to be. Again, I don't know if that's ever how Kagi put it themselves, but that's the impression that was given.