Fatih can not be lost From Vladimir Prelovac To kobld Date Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 1:00 AM Hi there I saw this today https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html Almost everything here is opposite of what I stand for. I am happy to bridge the gap and clarify the misunderstandings on a call. Would you like the opportunity o talk directly? Vlad ------------- Re: Fatih can not be lost From kobld To Vladimir Prelovac Date Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 7:02 AM Thanks for reaching out, but no, I would not. I am not interested in being cornered into a call by the owner of a business because I made a blog post about it. ------------- Re: Fatih can not be lost From Vladimir Prelovac To kobld Date Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 10:20 AM I am not looking to corner anyone. I want to clarify things, the same you would react if someone wrote things about you that are not true. At least I can share a link on AI integration philosophy so that you can understand that we are very careful about AI. https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy In fact, when you go to kagi.com as a new user, AI is mentioned exactly zero times. And this is the Kagi origin story, and why I am doing this. https://dkb.io/post/DEPR_kagi-interview Everything else, there is nuance to it that you missed in your blog post. We are all human. Best Vlad ------------- From kobld To Vladimir Prelovac Date Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 11:42 AM I may not have spelled this out explicitly in my previous reply but I will do so here: I am not interested in getting more replies from you on this subject. Declining a call does not mean I want you to argue with me about Kagi in email either. I do not trust you, personally, either and do not want to have a conversation about that. And for the record, I read that blog page already. If you had read my own blog post, you would notice that I link to it. ------------- Re: Fatih can not be lost From Vladimir Prelovac To kobld Date Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 12:38 PM I do see a lot of passion about the idea of Kagi in your writing which is why I am taking time to address points in your post personally. Ther eis an incredible amount of research you did, and I wish you came to it open minded vs with an agenda. I hope the below will clarify a few things and happy to clarify anything else. > First of all, as a project, Kagi stretches itself way too thin. "Kagi" isn't just Kagi Search, it's also a whole slew of AI tools, a Mac-only web browser called Orion, and right now they are planning on launching an email service as well. Other search engines tried and failed in the past. Other browsers tried and failed. I think the reason is that no company can hope to meaningfully replace big tech without hollistic replacement. Which means Kagi needs to build search, browser and email as gigantic of an effort that may require. This does not make me happy, and is a cause of lot of pain. But because I really want to see the vision come through I know we have to do it. > have claimed that at 25,000 users they would be breaking even Kagi is indeed profitable now, and we will discuss this soon in a blog post. > But I cannot stress enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out, they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and employee Yes it is a recurring pattern that we like to do things the hard way. Other companies would spend this money on advertisements, we are spending the money to say thank you to all our users that supported us on our ourney. And yes it is extremely difficult to do all this, and not company does it. Not even Google ever printed 20k tshirts to give away for free. > Kagi was not paying sales tax for two years and they finally have to pay up. They just...didn't do it. Didn't think it was important? I have no idea why. Implementing sales tax is an extraordinary hard task. it is taking us more than 6 months with resources we have now. The reason we did not do it initially is a) you do not need to collect sales tax until a certain threshold of users (for example 1000 users in certain US states etc) b) I did not know if Kagi will ever cross these thresholds. Two years ago when we launched Kagi nobody thought about paying for a search engine. I had no idea whether this will take off or not and it made sense not to invest in sales tax complience at the time, but worry about it when (if) we cross the thresholds. > AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on these days That is not true, we have 3 people working on AI in a 25 person team so about 10% overall effort. > they have fully bought into AI being the future of search We did not. Our AI integration philosophy is that AI is just a tool that you need to learn to use, not a replacement for your brain. It also demands that all AI tools are strictly on demand (opt-in). https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-ai-search#philosophy Furthermore, a new user coming to kagi.com website will see exactly zero mentions of AI. So to say that we fully bought into AI is simply wrong. > They have "FastGPT", where their focus is having a ChatGPT style service that is focused on being fast, not accurate. Yep, it is an experiment built by our small team. Hallucinations are a big problem for LLMs and we do not expect to solve it. AI is a tool that should be used with care, not a replacement for brain. > "Universal Summarizer" tool, that again is more of the same old AI bullshit. I find Summarizer very useful and so do many of our users. Helps me decide if I want to read a long resaerch paper or watch a long youtube video. > But the developers of Kagi fully believe that this is what search engines should be, a bunch of AI tools so that you don't even need to read primary sources anymore We do not. We are experimenting with AI to the extent that it is reasonable. Nowhere in Kagi will you get AI by default. That is just the fact. > it's clear that he will not listen to anyone saying they might be bad in any way. I really listen to everyone, respond to every comment, and transaprently share my opinion. I mostly have issues with people not wanting to listen what I have to say and refuse conversation. > And he is very, very much the type that believes "not everything is political" and "we don't get into politics”. Only in my professional capacity. In my private capacity I will discuss politics at the dinner table, but that is my private thing. Engaging in politics from a standpoint of leading a company is wrong and something I do not want to do. > , he has stated before that he thinks 3 star reviews on products are "by definition" unbiased, because they must include good and bad points. I stand by this. Find a better way to find unbiased reviews on amazon and we will implement it. > Generally, if someone brings up a security or privacy concern, Vlad's response is either "trust me bro” That is vast misrepresentation, I never said that. > He believes that email addresses don't count as personally identifiable information, because you can simply use a burner account Personal emails are PII. But you can register to Kagi with a random email, and that is not PII. > A lot of questions about what information Kagi collects on people is met with either saying nothing That is not true. All our data policies are explained in our privacy polciies. And we have addressed every single privacy related question. > Asking what data Stripe collects on them through Kagi, and more importantly what data Stripe sends back TO Kagi, also gets you a vague "I don't know” answer We are transparent about using Stripe, and anyone can go read their privacy policy for themselves. We are in no way responsible or have leverage over it. > He doesn't entertain any discussions about GDPR because he thinks they have nothing that applies anyway. I’ve entertained many, in fact answered every single one. > But what good is filtering out all of the AI generated spamblogs on a search platform that wants to spit more AI generated bullshit at me directly? Sure I can turn it off That is a misconception again. There is nothing to turn off, because it is all turned off by default. ------------- Re: Fatih can not be lost From kobld To Vladimir Prelovac Date Thursday, April 11th, 2024 at 12:41 PM I do not know how much more clearer I could have been in my last email that I want you to quit emailing me.