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AI assisted search-based research works now

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#11

Post by simonw »

sshine wrote: post #9

The article doesn’t mention Kagi: The Assistant, a search-powered LLM frontend that came out of closed beta around the beginning of the year, and got included in all paid plans since yesterday. It really is a game changer when the search engine I find that an AI performing multiple searches on variations of keywords, and aggregating the top results across keywords is more extensive than most people, myself included,…

I haven't tried Kagi's product here yet. Do you know which LLM it uses under the hood?

Edit: from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html it looks like the answer is "all of them":

> Access to the latest and most performant large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Mistral, Amazon, Alibaba and DeepSeek

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#12

Post by intended »

I find that these conversations on HN end up covering similar positions constantly.

I believe that most positions are resolved if

1) you accept that these are fundamentally narrative tools. They build stories, In whatever style you wish. Stories of code, stories of project reports. Stories or conversations.

2) this is balanced by the idea that the core of everything in our shared information economy is Verification.

The reason experts get use out of these tools, is because they can verify when the output is close enough to be indistinguishable from expert effort.

Domain experts also do another level of verification (hopefully) which is to check if the generated content computes correctly as a result - based on their mental model of their domain.

I would predict that that LLMs are deadly in the hands of people who can’t gauge the output, and will end up driving themselves off of a cliff, while experts will be able to use it effectively on tasks where verification of the output has a comparative effort advantage, over the task of creating the output.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#13

Post by saulpw »

I tried it recently. I asked for videochat services like the one I use (WB) with 2 specific features that the most commonly used services don't have. It asked some clarifying questions and seemed to understand the mission, then went off for 10 minutes after which it returned 5 results in a table.

The first result was WB, which I gave to it as the first example and am already using. Results 2 and 3 were the mainstream services which it helpfully marked in the table as not having the features I need. Result 4 looked promising but was discontinued 3 years ago. Result 5 was an actual option which I'm trying out (but may not work for other reasons).

So, 1/5 usable results. That was mildly helpful I guess, but it appeared a lot more helpful on the surface than it was. And I don't seem to have the ability to say "nice try but dig deeper".

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#14

Post by dcre »

simonw wrote: post #11
sshine wrote: post #9

The article doesn’t mention Kagi: The Assistant, a search-powered LLM frontend that came out of closed beta around the beginning of the year, and got included in all paid plans since yesterday. It really is a game changer when the search engine I find that an AI performing multiple searches on variations of keywords, and aggregating the top results across keywords is more extensive than most people, myself included,…

I haven't tried Kagi's product here yet. Do you know which LLM it uses under the hood? Edit: from https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html it looks like the answer is "all of them": > Access to the latest and most performant large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Mistral, Amazon, Alibaba and DeepSeek

Yep, regular paid Kagi sub comes with cheap models for free: GPT-4o-mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash, etc. If you pay extra you can get the SOTA models, though IMO flash is good enough for most stuff if the search result context is good.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#15

Post by simonw »

saulpw wrote: post #13

I tried it recently. I asked for videochat services like the one I use (WB) with 2 specific features that the most commonly used services don't have. It asked some clarifying questions and seemed to understand the mission, then went off for 10 minutes after which it returned 5 results in a table. The first result was WB, which I gave to it as the first example and am already using. Results 2 and 3 were the mainstream…

That sounds like a Deep Research query, was that with OpenAI or Gemini?

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#16

Post by saulpw »

simonw wrote: post #15
saulpw wrote: post #13

I tried it recently. I asked for videochat services like the one I use (WB) with 2 specific features that the most commonly used services don't have. It asked some clarifying questions and seemed to understand the mission, then went off for 10 minutes after which it returned 5 results in a table. The first result was WB, which I gave to it as the first example and am already using. Results 2 and 3 were the mainstream…

That sounds like a Deep Research query, was that with OpenAI or Gemini?

This was OpenAI.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#17

Post by parodysbird »

qwertox wrote: post #5

I feel like the benefit which AI gives us programmers is limited. They can be extremely advanced, accelerative and helpful assistants, but we're limited to just that: architecting and developing software. Biologists, mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and the like seem to have an open-ended benefit from the research which AI is now starting to enable. I kind of envy them. Unless one moves into AI research?

Biologists, mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers are already the experts who produce the text in their domain that the LLMs might have been trained on...

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#18

Post by baq »

> I can feel my usage of Google search taking a nosedive already.

Conveniently Gemini is the best frontier model for everything else, they’re very interested and well positioned (if not best?) to also be the best in deep research. Let’s check back in 3-6 months.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#19

Post by energy123 » 

  > The user-facing Google Gemini app can search too, but it doesn’t show me what it’s searching for.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is also capable of search as part of its chain of thought but it needs light prodding to show URLs, but it'll do so and is good at it.

Unrelated point, but I'm going to keep saying this anywhere Google engineers may be reading, the main problem with Gemini is their horrendous web app riddled with 5 annoying bugs that I identified as a casual user after a week. I assume it's in such a bad state because they don't actually use the app and they use the API, but come on. You solved the hard problem of making the world's best overall model but are squandering it on the world's worst user interface.

Re: AI assisted search-based research works now

#20

Post by oulipo »

The main "real-world" use cases for AI use for now have been:

- shooting buildings in Gaza https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-ai-weapons-43...

- compiling a list of information on Government workers in US https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/elon-musk-s-doge-usi...

- creating a few losy music videos

I'd argue we'd be better off SLOWING DOWN with that shit

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