Comment by EbNar

5 days ago

Well, good for you, I guess. But for the rest of us who use the Assistant this would be a net downgrade, AKA paying the same for less.

13 comments

EbNar

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digitalPhonix  4 days ago

Wasn’t it also a free upgrade when it launched? They didn’t bump the price of their search plans when they added Assistant.

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.

fgonzag  4 days ago

Same here. I'd definitely drop the subscription immediately, unless the assistant was super cheap, like $1 or $2 more which is the most I'd pay for kagi personally.

genthree  4 days ago

Is it any better than Google's or the one in DDG? Those things are wrong most of the time for questions that couldn't have been answered by looking at a few words in the summary of the very first search result anyway. I find they only save me time if what I was searching was so trivial that it doesn't matter at all if it's wrong ("How old is such-and-such actor?") and I didn't really even need to search it in the first place. Otherwise, if it actually matters, I still have to check the sources, because no matter how confident the answer looks, it's wrong way too often to rely on it.

(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.)

  • EbNar  4 days ago

    I've never user Google or DDG assistants, tbh. My use for Kagi's assistant is for stuff related to work. I'm a university prof., so it "saves me a bit of time" while checking for errors in assignments, clarify concepts to explain to students and so on. I almost never use it to search for stuff.

shaky-carrousel  5 days ago

For the rest of us that deeply distrust and despise the anti-ethical and wasteful assistants is an upgrade.

  • mpalmer  5 days ago

    You haven't thought too hard about it then; Kagi is (in part) looking to get better margins on its AI spend here.

  • EbNar  5 days ago

    Friendly reminder that you're not forced to use it. "I despise soccer, so soccer should disappear".

    • cardanome  5 days ago

      You still have to live in a world where LLMs exist and are based on the stolen labor of millions of people and are actively destroying the livelihood of people, our environment and democracy.

      1 reply →

    • willis936  4 days ago

      I think a more fair analogy is "I despise soccer, so the specific cable package I choose should not include it".