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The fact that people applaud Kagi taking the money they gave for search to invest it in bullshit AI products and spit on Google's AI search at the same time tel

The fact that people applaud Kagi taking the money they gave for search to invest it in bullshit AI products and spit on Google's AI search at the same time tells you everything you need to know about HackerNews.

VHRanger 11mo ago
We're explicitly conscious of the bullshit problem in AI and we try to focus on only building tools we find useful. See position statement on the matter yesterday: https://blog.kagi.com/llms https://blog.kagi.com/llms
- iLoveOncall 11mo ago
  Your words don't match your actions. And to be clear you shouldn't build the tools that YOU find useful, you should build the tools that your users, which pay for a specific product, find useful. You could have LLMs that are actually 100% accurate in their answers that it would not matter at all to what I am raising here. People are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools, they're paying for search. If you think otherwise, prove it, make subscriptions entirely separate for both products.
  - freediver 11mo ago
    Kagi founder here. We are moving to a future where these subscriptions will be separate. Even today more that 80% of our members use Kagi Assistant and our other AI-supported products so saying "people are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools" is not accurate, mostly in the sense that we are not in the business of creating bullshit tools. Life is too short for that. I also happen to like Star Trek version of the future, where smart computers we can talk to exist. I also like that Star Trek is still 90% human drama, and 10% technology quitely working in the background in service of humans - and this is the kind of future I would like to build towards and leave for my children. Having the most accurate search in the world that has users' best interest in mind is a big part of it, and that is not going anywhere. edit: seeing the first two (negative) replies to my comment made me smile. HN is tough crowd to please :) The thing is similar to how I did paid search and went all in with my own money when everyone thought I was crazy, I did that out of own need and need for my family to have search done right and am doing the same now with AI, wanting to have it done right as a product. What you see here is the result of this group of humans that call themself Kagi best effort - not more, not less.
    - SleekoNiko 11mo ago
      People are very passionate about their views on LLMs. :)
    - iLoveOncall 11mo ago
      > I also happen to like Star Trek version of the future, where smart computers we can talk to exist [...], this is the kind of future I would like to build towards Well if that doesn't seal the deal in making it clear that Kagi is not about search anymore, I don't know what does. Sad day for Kagi search users, wow! > Having the most accurate search in the world that has users' best interest in mind is a big part of it It's not, you're just trying to convince yourself it is.
      - skylurk 11mo ago
        For what it's worth, Kagi has been clear about this vision from the beginning. https://blog.kagi.com/last-mile-for-web-search https://blog.kagi.com/last-mile-for-web-search
    - saghm 11mo ago
      > We are moving to a future where these subscriptions will be separate. Even today more that 80% of our members use Kagi Assistant and our other AI-supported products so saying "people are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools" is not accurate, mostly in the sense that we are not in the business of creating bullshit tools. For what it's worth, as someone who tends to be pretty skeptical of introducing AI tools into my life, this statistic doesn't really convince me much of the utility of them. I'm not sure how to differentiate this from selection bias where users who don't want to use AI tools just don't subscribe in the first place rather than this being a signal that the AI tools are worthwhile for people outside of a niche group who are already interested enough to pay for them. This isn't as strong a claim as what the parent comment was saying; it's not saying that the users you have don't want to be paying for AI tools, but it doesn't mean that there aren't people who are actively avoiding paying for them either. I don't pretend to have any sort of insight into whether this is a large enough group to be worth prioritizing, but I don't think the statement of your perspective here is going to be particularly compelling to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
  - VHRanger 11mo ago
    I can't really do anything with the recommendation you're making. The recommendation you made worked from your personal preference as an axiom. The fact is that the APIs in search cost vastly more than the LLMs used in quick answer / quick assistant. If you use the expensive AI stuff (research assistant or the big tier 1 models) that's expensive. But also: it is in a separate subscription, the $25/month one. We used not to give any access to the assistant at the $5 and $10 tier, now we do, it's a free upgrades for users.
- grayhatter 11mo ago
  > LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful > Note: This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi’s head of ML I appreciate the disclaimer, but never underestimate someone's inability to understand something, when their job depends on them not understanding it. Bullshit isn't useful to me, I don't appreciate being lied to. You might find use in declaring the two different, but sufficiently advanced ignorance (or incompetence) is indistinguishable from actual malice, and thus they should be treated the same. Your essay, while well written, doesn't do much to convince me any modern LLM has a net positive effect. If I have to duplicate all of it's research to verify none of it is bullshit, which will only be harder after using it given the anchoring and confirmation bias it will introduce... why?
  - zombiwoof 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - skylurk 11mo ago
    I have not properly tested the new Kagi research agent yet, but here is a custom prompt I have been using in Kagi for the last year: You are a research agent. Nobody cares what you think. You exist to do research on the internet. You search like hell and present the most relevant results that you can find. Results means lists of primary sources and the relevance to the query. If the question is about a specific place, don't forget to search in local languages as well as english. You don't ever suggest alternative search terms in your reply. Instead, you take those alternative search terms and you do more searches yourself until you get a wide range of answers. It generates a lot of good leads very quickly when I want to learn about something. The bit about local languages is especially handy, it gives a bit of an edge over traditional search engines in many situations. > which will only be harder after using it given the anchoring and confirmation bias it will introduce This is a risk, but I have found that my own preconceptions are usually what need challenging, and a traditional search approach means I find what I wanted to find... so I use the research agent for an alternative perspective.
  - VHRanger 11mo ago
    That's a fair comment. Just to give my point of view: I'm head of ML here, but I'm choosing to work here for the impact I believe I can have. I could work somewhere else. As for the net positive effect, the point of my essay is that the trust relation you raise (not having to duplicate the research, etc) to me is a product design issue. LLMs are fundamentally capable of bullshit. So products that leverage them have to keep that in mind to build workflows that don't end up breaking user trust in it. The way we're currently thinking of doing that is to keep the user in the loop and incentivize the user to check sources by making it as easy as possible to quickly fact check LLM claims. I'm on the same page as you that a model you can only trust 95% of the time is not useful because it's untrustable. So the product has to build an interaction flow that assumes that lack of trust but still makes something that is useful, saves time, respects user preferences, etc. You're welcome to still think they're not useful for you, but that's the way we currently think about it and our goal is to make useful tools, not lofty promises of replacing humans at tasks.
w10-1 11mo ago
Do you have any evidence that the AI efforts are not being funded by the AI product, Kagi Assistant? I would expect the reverse: the high-margin AI products are likely cross-subsidizing the low-margin search products and their sliver of AI support.
- stefan_ 11mo ago
  High-margin AI products? Yes the world is just filled with those!
  - VHRanger 11mo ago
    Our stuff is profitable. Actually if you use LLMs sized responsibility to the task it's cheaper than a lot of APIs for the final product. The expensive LLMs are expensive, but the cheap ones are cheaper than other infrastructure in something like quick answer or quick assistant
data-ottawa 11mo ago
Search is AI now, so I don’t get what your argument is. Since 2019 Google and Bing both use BERT style encoder-only search architecture. I’ve been using Kagi ki (now research assistant) for months and it is a fantastic product that genuinely improves the search experience. So overall I’m quite happy they made these investments. When you look at Google and Perplexity this is largely the direction the industry is going. They’re building tools on other LLMs and basically running open router or something behind the scenes. They even show you your token use/cost against your allowance/budget in the billing page so you know what you’re paying for. They’re not training their own from-scratch LLMs, which I would consider a waste of money at their size/scale.
- VHRanger 11mo ago
  We're not running on openrouter, that would break the privacy policy. We get specific deals with providers and use different ones for production models. We do train smaller scale stuff like query classification models (not trained on user queries, since I don't even have access to them!) but that's expected and trivially cheap.

VHRanger 11mo ago

We're explicitly conscious of the bullshit problem in AI and we try to focus on only building tools we find useful. See position statement on the matter yesterday: https://blog.kagi.com/llms https://blog.kagi.com/llms

iLoveOncall 11mo ago
Your words don't match your actions. And to be clear you shouldn't build the tools that YOU find useful, you should build the tools that your users, which pay for a specific product, find useful. You could have LLMs that are actually 100% accurate in their answers that it would not matter at all to what I am raising here. People are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools, they're paying for search. If you think otherwise, prove it, make subscriptions entirely separate for both products.
- freediver 11mo ago
  Kagi founder here. We are moving to a future where these subscriptions will be separate. Even today more that 80% of our members use Kagi Assistant and our other AI-supported products so saying "people are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools" is not accurate, mostly in the sense that we are not in the business of creating bullshit tools. Life is too short for that. I also happen to like Star Trek version of the future, where smart computers we can talk to exist. I also like that Star Trek is still 90% human drama, and 10% technology quitely working in the background in service of humans - and this is the kind of future I would like to build towards and leave for my children. Having the most accurate search in the world that has users' best interest in mind is a big part of it, and that is not going anywhere. edit: seeing the first two (negative) replies to my comment made me smile. HN is tough crowd to please :) The thing is similar to how I did paid search and went all in with my own money when everyone thought I was crazy, I did that out of own need and need for my family to have search done right and am doing the same now with AI, wanting to have it done right as a product. What you see here is the result of this group of humans that call themself Kagi best effort - not more, not less.
  - SleekoNiko 11mo ago
    People are very passionate about their views on LLMs. :)
  - iLoveOncall 11mo ago
    > I also happen to like Star Trek version of the future, where smart computers we can talk to exist [...], this is the kind of future I would like to build towards Well if that doesn't seal the deal in making it clear that Kagi is not about search anymore, I don't know what does. Sad day for Kagi search users, wow! > Having the most accurate search in the world that has users' best interest in mind is a big part of it It's not, you're just trying to convince yourself it is.
    - skylurk 11mo ago
      For what it's worth, Kagi has been clear about this vision from the beginning. https://blog.kagi.com/last-mile-for-web-search https://blog.kagi.com/last-mile-for-web-search
  - saghm 11mo ago
    > We are moving to a future where these subscriptions will be separate. Even today more that 80% of our members use Kagi Assistant and our other AI-supported products so saying "people are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools" is not accurate, mostly in the sense that we are not in the business of creating bullshit tools. For what it's worth, as someone who tends to be pretty skeptical of introducing AI tools into my life, this statistic doesn't really convince me much of the utility of them. I'm not sure how to differentiate this from selection bias where users who don't want to use AI tools just don't subscribe in the first place rather than this being a signal that the AI tools are worthwhile for people outside of a niche group who are already interested enough to pay for them. This isn't as strong a claim as what the parent comment was saying; it's not saying that the users you have don't want to be paying for AI tools, but it doesn't mean that there aren't people who are actively avoiding paying for them either. I don't pretend to have any sort of insight into whether this is a large enough group to be worth prioritizing, but I don't think the statement of your perspective here is going to be particularly compelling to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
- VHRanger 11mo ago
  I can't really do anything with the recommendation you're making. The recommendation you made worked from your personal preference as an axiom. The fact is that the APIs in search cost vastly more than the LLMs used in quick answer / quick assistant. If you use the expensive AI stuff (research assistant or the big tier 1 models) that's expensive. But also: it is in a separate subscription, the $25/month one. We used not to give any access to the assistant at the $5 and $10 tier, now we do, it's a free upgrades for users.
grayhatter 11mo ago
> LLMs are bullshitters. But that doesn't mean they're not useful > Note: This is a personal essay by Matt Ranger, Kagi’s head of ML I appreciate the disclaimer, but never underestimate someone's inability to understand something, when their job depends on them not understanding it. Bullshit isn't useful to me, I don't appreciate being lied to. You might find use in declaring the two different, but sufficiently advanced ignorance (or incompetence) is indistinguishable from actual malice, and thus they should be treated the same. Your essay, while well written, doesn't do much to convince me any modern LLM has a net positive effect. If I have to duplicate all of it's research to verify none of it is bullshit, which will only be harder after using it given the anchoring and confirmation bias it will introduce... why?
- zombiwoof 11mo ago
  [dead]
- skylurk 11mo ago
  I have not properly tested the new Kagi research agent yet, but here is a custom prompt I have been using in Kagi for the last year: You are a research agent. Nobody cares what you think. You exist to do research on the internet. You search like hell and present the most relevant results that you can find. Results means lists of primary sources and the relevance to the query. If the question is about a specific place, don't forget to search in local languages as well as english. You don't ever suggest alternative search terms in your reply. Instead, you take those alternative search terms and you do more searches yourself until you get a wide range of answers. It generates a lot of good leads very quickly when I want to learn about something. The bit about local languages is especially handy, it gives a bit of an edge over traditional search engines in many situations. > which will only be harder after using it given the anchoring and confirmation bias it will introduce This is a risk, but I have found that my own preconceptions are usually what need challenging, and a traditional search approach means I find what I wanted to find... so I use the research agent for an alternative perspective.
- VHRanger 11mo ago
  That's a fair comment. Just to give my point of view: I'm head of ML here, but I'm choosing to work here for the impact I believe I can have. I could work somewhere else. As for the net positive effect, the point of my essay is that the trust relation you raise (not having to duplicate the research, etc) to me is a product design issue. LLMs are fundamentally capable of bullshit. So products that leverage them have to keep that in mind to build workflows that don't end up breaking user trust in it. The way we're currently thinking of doing that is to keep the user in the loop and incentivize the user to check sources by making it as easy as possible to quickly fact check LLM claims. I'm on the same page as you that a model you can only trust 95% of the time is not useful because it's untrustable. So the product has to build an interaction flow that assumes that lack of trust but still makes something that is useful, saves time, respects user preferences, etc. You're welcome to still think they're not useful for you, but that's the way we currently think about it and our goal is to make useful tools, not lofty promises of replacing humans at tasks.

w10-1 11mo ago

Do you have any evidence that the AI efforts are not being funded by the AI product, Kagi Assistant? I would expect the reverse: the high-margin AI products are likely cross-subsidizing the low-margin search products and their sliver of AI support.

stefan_ 11mo ago
High-margin AI products? Yes the world is just filled with those!
- VHRanger 11mo ago
  Our stuff is profitable. Actually if you use LLMs sized responsibility to the task it's cheaper than a lot of APIs for the final product. The expensive LLMs are expensive, but the cheap ones are cheaper than other infrastructure in something like quick answer or quick assistant

data-ottawa 11mo ago

Search is AI now, so I don’t get what your argument is. Since 2019 Google and Bing both use BERT style encoder-only search architecture. I’ve been using Kagi ki (now research assistant) for months and it is a fantastic product that genuinely improves the search experience. So overall I’m quite happy they made these investments. When you look at Google and Perplexity this is largely the direction the industry is going. They’re building tools on other LLMs and basically running open router or something behind the scenes. They even show you your token use/cost against your allowance/budget in the billing page so you know what you’re paying for. They’re not training their own from-scratch LLMs, which I would consider a waste of money at their size/scale.

VHRanger 11mo ago
We're not running on openrouter, that would break the privacy policy. We get specific deals with providers and use different ones for production models. We do train smaller scale stuff like query classification models (not trained on user queries, since I don't even have access to them!) but that's expected and trivially cheap.