I pay for a lot of tools, but patterns like this leave me with a really bad impression.
I tried cancelling Exa (search) and they had me email the support, which they ignored and required a follow up. Then they had the nerves to ask for feedback.
https://sintons.co.uk/sintons_i_p/new-laws-protecting-consum...
> Traditional search engines were built for humans. They rank URLs, assuming someone will click through and navigate to a page. The search engine's job ends at the link. The system optimizes for keywords searches, click-through rates, and page layouts designed for browsing - done in milliseconds and as cheaply as possible.
> ... AI search has to solve a different problem: what tokens should go in an agent's context window to help it complete the task? We’re not ranking URLs for humans to click— we’re optimizing context and tokens for models to reason over.
> The materials displayed or performed or available on or through our website, including, but not limited to, text, graphics, data, articles, photos, images, illustrations and so forth (all of the foregoing, the “Content”) are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property laws. You promise to abide by all copyright notices, trademark rules, information, and restrictions contained in any Content you access through our website, and you won’t use, copy, reproduce, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, upload, display, license, sell, commercialize or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content not owned by you, (i) without the prior consent of the owner of that Content or (ii) in a way that violates someone else’s (including Parallel's) rights.
The major difference is the how the data is structured for consumption.
It does have a relatively large context window, and ime is very good at format adherence
I agree there is a need for such APIs. Using Google or Bing isn't enough, and Exa and Brave haven't clearly solved this yet.
When an AI searches google.com for you, the ads never get shown to the user. Search engines like kagi.com are the future. You'll give the AI your Kagi API key and that'll be it. You won't even need cloud-based AI for that kind of thing! Tiny, local models trained for performing searches on behalf of the user will do it instead.
Soon your OS will regularly pull down AI model updates just like it pulls down software updates today. Every-day users will have dozens of models that are specialized for all sorts of tasks—like searching the Internet. They won't even know what they're for or what they do. Just like your average Linux user doesn't know what the `polkit` or `avahi-daemon` services do.
My hope: This will (eventually) put pressure on hardware manufacturers to include more VRAM in regular PCs/consumer GPUs.
if you say it for long enough, i'm sure you will be right!
Yes, this has been issue for for many content creators. I predict that because of this, a lot of internet will get behind a paywall. I run one, so I hope the future is bright, but overall this is very bad for the internet because it was never intended to be used this way. Sure, it will be great for users to save unimaginable amount of time searching manually, but if websites lose traffic, well...that is the end of the internet as we know it.
I used to work for the credit card industry like 15 years ago (damn, I feel old now). Back then, you know how much a credit card transaction actually cost (them)? $0.00001 (or something like that). That accounts for all the people they had working for them, the infrastructure, the servers, etc. It'd be even less today.
There's no reason for them to exist. The government should just setup a central bank transfer system with unlimited free transactions already. Or even better: Mandate that banks can't charge fees for transactions. Not to consumers or businesses! They already make enough money to more than make up for it (Source: I work for a bank and transaction fees are nothing but pure profit since there's basically zero cost associated with them).
Eh. Some of us remember an internet before the free-with-advertising became the norm. In the 90s and early 2000s people were putting stuff online for free with no desire to monetise that content. And it was way more expensive back then to do so. Today you can host a personal blog for less than a coffee. I for one wouldn't mind going back to people sharing stuff for the fun of it, isntead of the myriad of content that's only there to promote/sell/advertise for this and that.
I get that everyone wants to piggyback on the common-ness of words, but it'd be a lot cooler if they _didn't_.
Obligatory: information-dense format is valuable for humans too! But the entire Internet is propped up by ads so seems we can't have nice things.