this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
355 points (99.7% liked)
TechTakes
1490 readers
30 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It isn't in this post, but it's in the post this one is about. Kagi started as an AI company, pivoted to the search engine, and it's still trying to put AI into everything.
They didn't pivot.
The search engine was just a side Idea What Needs Doing the CEO had, that just happened to make the startup famous because of being somewhat less bad than the enshittified crap other search engines have become, then they lost interest (to be fair they seem to be about fifteen to twenty-something people, plus whoever they've got in Germany making free T-shirts, only half of them working full time, so there's only so much they can focus on) and went back to their main thing (which is apparently very bad but very fast AI).
At this point they're probably just keeping the paid search engine to try and pay back the taxes they owe due to having apparently forgotten taxes were a thing, though it was operating at a loss even before the tax thing (and before they wasted a third of their investment cash on free T-shirts), so they'll be having to raise their prices...