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Comment by leokennis | Hacker News Reader

I admire and applaud Kagi for what they are trying to be.

But on the AI front, the Assistant is simply worse than using for example Gemini or ChatGPT directly. It is slower, it cannot generate images etc.

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That's why I don't think anybody is going to pay for the Assistant alone.

On the other hand, it doesn't monetize any of the data you give. Six of one, half dozen of the other, yeah?

Re: image gen... it's a search engine. Why would I need my refrigerator to toast my bread?

Because at least for my own usage of Google the LLM started out as an interactive search with substantially better context filtering that could tune the results to my desired technical level. However I promptly started just having it explain the subject matter to me rather than spending 30+ minutes consulting various docs and forum posts because it makes for an excellent secretary/tutor combo provided you vigilantly watch for misinformation.

So to answer your question, while charts might not be particularly useful for a search engine a tutor certainly benefits from them.

The privacy buffer between the LLM providers and the user is a large part of the appeal. Having it hooked up to a search engine outside of the data broker space makes it uniquely attractive.

Given that window dressing, having toasted bread in a kitchen that isn't selling my data is something I want.

The research assistant should be able to generate images

I see the slowness and now the news that they might remove the assistant for the $10 plans as evidence of how costly it is to run LLMs and by extension how unsustainable it must be for OpenAi, anthropic, Microsoft etc to be offering such performance for free or very low prices. Surely something has to give soon.

It is not worse I would say. It uses neutral system prompt by default, whereas Gemini and ChatGPT will please you too much to mislead you badly. Also the base search is much batter. You can control the search while with Gemini, for example, you can't.

Keep in mind that kagi offers a wide range of models, not just one. I wouldn't want to have multiple subscriptions (for chatgpt, anthropic, gemini etc.)

In my experience that is true, but I get the answers I need much faster than any kagi search with or without their ai integration from Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude. I was rooting for them, but they just seemed to far behind the leading llms for search. Same with perplexity. Could never figure out why it needs to exist. If I want citations, I’ll just ask one of the LLMs I mentioned to provide them.

Also, there news app is pretty underwhelming.

This is also true if you use something like OpenRouter, and it will almost always cheaper or betterter (excluding Kagi Search).

I love Kagi-I can't imagine going back to any other search engine-but it isn’t competitive when it comes to LLMs. In its defense, that’s largely because others are bleeding money.

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