Your sarcastic refutation of the allegedly ridiculous assertion was devoid of any counterpoints on how the US government can stop China's progress in AI and what you think they are going to do about it. Just repeating it doesn't make it any more or less ridiculous.
A buddy of mine just bought 2 John Deere 8R tractors, he says he got a deal at $1.6 mil. $900k for the tracked machine and $700K for the wheeled. His combines are close to $1mil when you add in the grain heads.
Or just paying them. If they have access to resources, they have access to things of monetary value. Paying people will be vastly more powerful than it is even now when people's options of gainful employment keep dwindling.
Robot army controlled by AI is scary. Even more scary is robot _and_ human army controlled by AI.
We have an intellectual structure that has been largely the same irrespective of the level of technological advancement. The brightest among us think about hard problems. Even though all of us may not understand those advances, we all appreciate and celebrate them to varying degrees. Those who are able to comprehend have time to absorb, generate more discussion. In time, we honor those achievements that withstand the test of time or make big enough impact on the advancement of knowledge and/or society.
The process is as much a human experience as is the result. If we have dime-a-dozen results like this minus the process, where does our intellectual structure stand? We will just be a hierarchy of priests at the altar of the machine?
PS: Before someone comes up with an counter example of maths before and after calculators, that was a tool that accelerated the steps. This is replacing the brain.
> The process is as much a human experience as is the result.
Sure, but in your scenario, the process is the experience for a small group of people, while the result benefits everyone (perhaps not directly, but ultimately via a chain of applications). Which one is more important?
It's not at all a new dilemma either. Jacquard looms destroyed the "human experience" of manual weaving for craftsmen who spent decades to perfect their skill. They also made clothing orders of magnitude cheaper for everyone else.
> They also made clothing orders of magnitude cheaper for everyone else.
They also contributed to consumerism and use-and-throw culture and mounds of waste around the world. People were not mortgaging their homes to buy clothes. There was a spectrum.
Also, your example is of physical skill. Mechanized farming has lifted many out of hunger. All automation isn't bad.
However this is the last frontier of higher pursuit for mankind - using our minds. This is a totally different level.
We should enjoy the advancement. I also think the AI companies solving this or such problems with rewards shouldn't get any cash - that's the least they can do for human advancement having stolen the entirety of human knowledge and continuing to swallow never before seen amount of energy.
Steep at 300 searches per month or about 10 per day. If you search often, it is too expensive. If you rarely search, not worth 5 bucks.
They are plainly trying to push people to their $10 unlimited plan. I would have appreciated if they allowed, say, 600 searches per month for $5 or so.
I find that I rarely do one search. It’s usually a search, followed by looking at the first few links and probably opening them in tabs, then refining the search terms to get better results. It’s an iterative process. So the 10 per day on average would be exceeded quite quickly.
I too feel the yearly price of $108 for one person, $155 for two people and $216 for a family is expensive. Ok, maybe the family plan is cheaper if you can find five others to share it with.
One of the wildest things to me: Kagi actually warns you before renewals so you can cancel first if you want.
That's confidence in the product right there. I'd argue any subscription which won't do this is designed to exploit people who don't need or use a subscription.
You know how many things are asking for "~$10/mo". People don't have the purchasing power they used to, and everything has a subscription model. Firefox with DDG is good enough.
As they said, you wouldn't pay $10/month for search. This is why free pay-with-your-data services won. Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
> Nobody wants to pay for what they use, so companies extract value in other ways and you can't complain about that if you're not willing to pay what it costs.
I'm likely old school here, but I never liked "paying for what I use" in the online world because it required revealing some personally identifying information (i.e. to make payment). My attitude is almost certainly irrelevant these days, with the scope of online tracking, sharing of data, and the near necessity of disclosing one's identity to sites other than one's ISP, but it was an attitude that was established in my mind nearly 30 years ago.
(I also don't trust the pay for privacy model. First of all, you can never assume that paying for something implies your data won't be sold. That was even true before the public Internet. Then, even with statements about privacy, you cannot assume that will be true in the future. If the company is sold, management changes, or the company decides the need/want additional revenues, that will change. And that assumes they don't use weasel words about what privacy means, or the ultimate "we reserve the right to changes this agreement at any time".)
Kagi support zero knowledge search through a Firefox extension and Mullvad supports zero knowledge VPN by putting cash in an envelope with your account ID written on the outside.
I mean, there’s more privacy protection on payment data than there is for email address and browsing habits.
Plus most companies just push out payment handling to stripe. So most websites have little idea who actually transacted with them to begin with (email dependent).
Sure. I’m not saying you should pay for search just saying it is not economically feasible to monetize it directly. I pay for Kagi, but that makes me part of a very niche market.
And Google's ad revenue is likely more than that. Or, if it's not for every user, the ones who would opt out of ads are the ones who can pay. You're cannibalizing your highest value users.
Google kept increasing its profits since then, and it was one of the most successful businesses out there way before they changed the business model to become enshittified. The argument that their business model changed because people wouldn't pay for its services doesn't really stand.
True. I got this as my first LLM subscription (was a long time skeptic, less so now but still a bit), but now I have cursor too so maybe I can even downgrade. Thanks for the reminder. :)
My time, attention, and “brain” are valuable. Having aligned incentives with my search provider and control over the results it serves me through weighting is worth substantially more than I pay for unlimited.
Kagi is the stickiest digital subscription I have.
FWIW Kagi has worked hard on their pricing over the last few years and has been trying different models. They're not "big search" the price is what it is so it can exist as a business. 100% fine to not be a customer obviously, but then you forfeit your license to complain about Google spying on you and ruining the web. Like they're trying to solve the problem. IMHO speaking just for myself I feel a moral duty to support them.
I agree on all your points. I'm just saying, that the $5 tier is not a honest to good option. The $10 one is but they can make the $5 one genuine too by increasing the quota. I'm sure they have done their research and maybe increasing it will cannibalize the $10 tier.
It's relatively rare as of late that I need to specifically find something on the internet, and DDG does not suffice, so I rarely exhaust the 300 Kagi searches.
Most of the time I need to find out something, and in that case, Claude / Gemini / Grok / Perplexity / you name it work better. Most of my queries are technical by nature, not interesting for data mining on me personally.
The 300 searches a month work for me because I only use Kagi when I think it will give better results than others. And most searches are trivial so any free engine will do (like you have the website name and want the url).
We moved a few months ago and it was so satisfying seeing the inventory of cables I had been saving for years getting used up. The cable-watermark in the box actually started noticably lowering. Nobody gave me the loud praise I deserved but it sure was satisfying saying "yeah I have the cable for it, here you go" with a distinct feeling of superiority.
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