At the start of November, Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager for education, said K-12 schools will soon have to accept the company's AI services...
Some people can’t even open that and it’s the worst archive site to be using. They change websites so you can never know if what you see is what they really archived.
This article is about 7 years old, before AI was even used as widely as it is now, and it’s referencing their optional AI tool. This doesn’t strike me as “AI-First” but more like “we’re trying to make our AI search assistant more reliable than the rest”.
I get the AI hate and the “paid search” Kagi hate, but saying they’re an AI-First company doesn’t seem right to me. You don’t even get AI results unless you add a question mark to your search. Additionally, you can report websites and images for being slop. Can’t do that with any other search engine.
Settings -> Search -> AI -> disable “AI Feature Access”
That being the case, even with it enabled, I don’t really see what the feature does without either clicking “Quick Answer”, ending the query with “?”, or enabling “Auto Quick Answer”.
As for “paying for AI”, even before they released Assistant, the plan was the same cost (aside from them charging tax in the US now). They did adjust the plans, but it just made unlimited searches cheaper IIRC. I’m not really sure what an AI-free discount would look like anyway since search inherently uses AI to determine what the most relevant results are (at the very least via embeddings).
As far as I know, there’s no workaround-free way to disable AI overviews in Google.
Searches and calls to LLM models are calculated differently by Kagi. AI-free search is exactly what it sounds like. And considering AI is a money leech on even the most successful companies, the discount of excluding that from the price should be significant!
I’m curious if you have an example of this that produces good results. Without embeddings, how do you search for results that are related to the query but which don’t exactly contain it (or parts of it)?
For example, if you search “cats”, are you getting results for “felines” too in your “AI-free search”?
AI has been used to effectively search the web since useful web search engines were first created. There’s no other way to perform a semantic search based on the user’s input (outside of manually clustering search results, but that’s physically impossible if you’re indexing the entire internet).
Schools shouldn’t ever use tools that interrupt a lesson with an ad.
And we don’t know how much (if anything) it costs the school. It certainly doesn’t cost the student a subscription if that’s what you mean.
I mean yah, not allowing kids access to the internet at all for school Isn’t a terrible idea. Certainly one worth exploring at least. But failing that, minimizing ads online is a good step in that direction.
Maybe Kagi could first walk back their AI-first manifesto…
…or start offering plans that don’t force you to pay for their AI folly…
…Or schools could use literally anything else that doesn’t cost an extra subscription.
Why are you linking the DDoS website?
Some people can’t even open that and it’s the worst archive site to be using. They change websites so you can never know if what you see is what they really archived.
You should be able to plug this url into your archive site of choice: https://kagi.ai/manifesto.html#%3A~%3Atext=And+when+you%2CSiri+or+Alexa
This article is about 7 years old, before AI was even used as widely as it is now, and it’s referencing their optional AI tool. This doesn’t strike me as “AI-First” but more like “we’re trying to make our AI search assistant more reliable than the rest”.
I get the AI hate and the “paid search” Kagi hate, but saying they’re an AI-First company doesn’t seem right to me. You don’t even get AI results unless you add a question mark to your search. Additionally, you can report websites and images for being slop. Can’t do that with any other search engine.
Kagi doesn’t offer an AI-free plan.
The only way to avoid paying for AI is to avoid Kagi. That’s the only “option” they offer.
Settings -> Search -> AI -> disable “AI Feature Access”
That being the case, even with it enabled, I don’t really see what the feature does without either clicking “Quick Answer”, ending the query with “?”, or enabling “Auto Quick Answer”.
As for “paying for AI”, even before they released Assistant, the plan was the same cost (aside from them charging tax in the US now). They did adjust the plans, but it just made unlimited searches cheaper IIRC. I’m not really sure what an AI-free discount would look like anyway since search inherently uses AI to determine what the most relevant results are (at the very least via embeddings).
As far as I know, there’s no workaround-free way to disable AI overviews in Google.
Searches and calls to LLM models are calculated differently by Kagi. AI-free search is exactly what it sounds like. And considering AI is a money leech on even the most successful companies, the discount of excluding that from the price should be significant!
I’m curious if you have an example of this that produces good results. Without embeddings, how do you search for results that are related to the query but which don’t exactly contain it (or parts of it)?
For example, if you search “cats”, are you getting results for “felines” too in your “AI-free search”?
AI has been used to effectively search the web since useful web search engines were first created. There’s no other way to perform a semantic search based on the user’s input (outside of manually clustering search results, but that’s physically impossible if you’re indexing the entire internet).
Schools shouldn’t ever use tools that interrupt a lesson with an ad.
And we don’t know how much (if anything) it costs the school. It certainly doesn’t cost the student a subscription if that’s what you mean.
Why should tax dollars be funneled from one AI-focused company to another?
Especially this one.
If ads on school computers are a problem, great, let’s just drop the whole internet from them.
For exactly the reason I said.
I mean yah, not allowing kids access to the internet at all for school Isn’t a terrible idea. Certainly one worth exploring at least. But failing that, minimizing ads online is a good step in that direction.
You didn’t provide a reason to give this specific AI company money. You just said public schools should shuttle money to private companies in general.
I’m asking about why this specific one.
The reason I gave was that schools shouldn’t use services that have ads.
Kagi is the only ad free search provider.