I doubt anything comes close to Perplexity News at the moment, its truly amazing.
Kagi News
271–280 of 454 posts
Re: Kagi News
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet, after trying it, I have to admit it's more informative and less provocative than any other news source I've seen since at least 2005. I don't know how they do it, and I'm not sure I care, the result is they've eliminated both clickbait and ragebait, and the news are indeed better off for it!
Soulless, uncreative, not fact-checked (or read by anyone before clicking publish), not contributing anything back to the original journalists, all of the editorial decisions are done by an undeterministic AI filter. Not gonna call it the worst insult to journalism I've ever seen because I've seen factually(.)so which does essentially the same thing but calls it an "AI fact check", but it's not much better. It's like…
>soulless,uncreative
This is exactly how I want my news to be. Nothing worse than a headline about a new vaccine breakthrough, followed by a first paragraph that starts with "it was a cold November morning as I arrived in..."
I guess it's a matter of taste, but I prefer it short and to the point
Re: Kagi News
#273I think this is the wrong direction. We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators. Summaries are no substitute for real articles, even if they're generated by hand (and these apparently are not). Summaries are bound to strip the information of context, important details and analysis. There's also no accountability for the contents. Sure, there are links to the actual articles, but let's not kid ourse…
Also, they talk about "echo chambers" and "full spectrum of global perspectives". Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory, but how far should it go? Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context? Should an article about an airplane crossing the Pacific include "some experts believe that this is impossible because Earth is flat?" Exce…
> Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory
A bigger bias problem by far is bias by omission, so including all stories whether they meet the presenter's political agenda or not would be a great start.
Re: Kagi News
#274> This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks? This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
This is true in a big picture sense but that's not the concern of someone who's making a tool meant to be useful to users. The consequences of this existing will be what they will be.
Re: Kagi News
#275Kagi seems to be one of the few companies that put out services, genuinely trying to fix things with good intent. I hope it stays that way. (I was very skeptical about Kagi Assistant but now i am a happy Kagi Ultimate subscriber).
I'm curious, aside from pricing, what utility do you get from Assistant that you wouldn't from just subscribing directly to a single LLM?
> subscribing directly to a single LLM
You get multiple LLM in a single interface, with a single login and a single subscription to maintain, all your threads stored at the same place, the ability to switch between models in a thread, custom models...
Re: Kagi News
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider myself a major LLM optimist in many ways, but if I'm receiving a once per day curated news aggregation feed I feel I'd want a human eye. I guess an LLM in theory might have less of the biases found in humans, but you're trading one kind of bias for another.
Yeah, I agree. The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement bases itself on is a pretty hot philosophical topic I lean against Kagi on. It's just impossible to summarize any text without imparting some sort of value judgement on it, therefore "biasing" the text
> The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement bases itself on
Hmmm. Here I will quote some representative sections from the announcement [1]:
>> News is broken. We all know it, but we’ve somehow accepted it as inevitable. The endless notifications. The clickbait headlines designed to trigger rather than inform, driven by relentless ad monetization. The exhausting cycle of checking multiple apps throughout the day, only to feel more anxious and less informed than when we started. This isn’t what news was supposed to be. We can do better, and create what news should have been all along: pure, essential information that respects your intelligence and time.
>> .. Kagi News operates on a simple principle: understanding the world requires hearing from the world. Every day, our system reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives. We then distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.
>> .. We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives. This multi-source approach helps reveal the full picture beyond any single viewpoint.
>> .. If you’re tired of news that makes you feel worse about the world while teaching you less about it, we invite you to try a different approach with Kagi News, so download it today ...
I don't see any evidence from these selections (nor the announcement as a whole) that their approach states, assumes, or requires a value/fact dichotomy. Additionally, I read various example articles to look for evidence that their information architecture group information along such a dichotomy.
Lastly, to be transparent, I'll state a claim that I find to be true: for many/most statements, it isn't that difficult nor contentious to separate out factual claims from value claims. We don't need to debate the exact percentages or get into the weeds on this unless you think it will be useful.
I will grant this -- which is a different point that what the commenter above made -- when reading various articles from a particular source, it can take effort and analysis to suss out the source's level of intellectual honesty, ulterior motives, and other questions I mention in my sibling comment.
Re: Kagi News
#277Looks like a decentralize and locally hosted version of https://particle.news
My thoughts too! Strange that got much less traction when the app was posted half a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698590
Re: Kagi News
#278Just to be clear I'm understanding correctly: This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks? I'm asking because that is what it looks like, but AI / LLMs are not specifically mentioned in this blog post, they just say news are 'generated' under the 'News in your language' heading, whi…
Yes, they are not the only player here. Quite a few companies are doing this, if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the exact feature set.
Re: Kagi News
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A lot of times when I ask for a source, They'll do pretty much everything you ask of them, so unless the text actually come from some source (via tool calls, injecting content into the context or other way), they'll make up a source rather than doing nothing, unless prompted otherwise.
They could make up source, but ChatGPT is an actual app with complicated backend, not dumb pipe between textedit and GPU. Surely they could verify on server side every link they output to user before including it in the answer. I'm sure Codex will implement it in no time!
This is actually harder then most think. The chances of your app doing this check being bot detected/blocked is very high.
(unless you are Google etc which are specifically let in to get the article indexed into search)
Re: Kagi News
#280I'd like to pay Kagi if I can submit my feeds and the insights from them, as I see from the portal now it's not that interesting...