Kagi Changelog (July 2): Heads, tails, and an AI toggle | Hacker News Reader

Kagi Changelog (July 2): Heads, tails, and an AI toggle

kagi.com

68 pointsmroche15 comments

> It's finally here! We believe that Kagi's application of AI should always be useful - there when you'd like it, and never when you don't, and always respecting your privacy.

It's nice to have choice here when, e.g. Google, has been trending in the opposite direction.

Even before this toggle Kagi's implementation seemed very opt-in. But default there aren't AI answers, a question market needs to be added at the end of the search string, and I believe that could be turned off. It seems like this new toggle would mainly get rid of the button to trigger an AI answer on the search page.

Something not mentioned in the changelog that I just noticed: Kagi Assistant now offers Gemma 4 31B hosted at Cerebras. It’s insanely fast and seems to follow instructions quite well as a research assistant.

Gemma 4 31B as hosted by Cerebras is almost too fast! Like I gave it a few different queries and the response was instant and I thought there was something wrong and there was a glitch and I had to double check that I had actually given it the correct prompt.

Mind you Gemma 4 is still Gemma 4, but the speed was really eye opening. Like a glimpse into the future of AI

I'd been hoping for G4 to be added so I could play around with it. Pretty much spent all of last week doing so. I thought something was short-circuiting due to the speed of response, I'd never seen a model operate that fast.

https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/gemma-4-31b

Interesting to see this and SearXNG on the front page at the same time. The latter replaced the former for me, and I've enjoyed primarily searching through a local model.

SearXNG is different though, because it still relies on a data-harvesting, ad-driven online economy. Off course if all you care about is privacy, might be fine, not sure how good it is at hiding you, but if you care more about not having your data/attention be the revenue source and having software incentives be to offer something customers are willing to part money for, Kagi is still it.

As I remember, Kagi's index isn't entirely its own. They do some crawling themselves, but they still rely heavily on purchasing search results from Microsoft and Google to complement their own.

That's true, that's a money constraint, which hopefully would mean as they gain more paying users, they can scale their index further, and rely less and less on other indexes.

edit: Kagi Translate still works for paying customers. I was completely unaware they'd been giving it away for free.

>Kagi News and Kagi Translate have both been successes that took us by surprise. ... >But these unexpected successes led to a massive spike in our costs for applications offered for free.

>As a result, we have temporarily removed translations and left access to the articles’ original languages as well as English. Kagi Translate will be back in the coming days as a subscription-based service.

Free? I'm a paying customer. Maybe you can't provide unlimited translate access, but I expect some amount of translation access as part of my Kagi subscription.

"If you have an active subscription, Translate still works."

That's from the June 16 post, does that still apply?

I'm a subscriber, and I just tested that translate still works fine

Awesome, I was a bit concerned.

There are still problems though - in Chrome translation addon simply no way to login properly so its broken //

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