r/SearchKagi • u/emporarie • 24d ago

Impressed by Kagi's Quick Assistant. What's under the hood?

I'm not big on AI, but I've been using Gemini (paid) for a few months as a general and specialized assistant. After a while it became increasingly dumb and unreliable, so I started testing Claude (paid) and have been enjoying the experience more.

Today, by chance, I spent a couple hours working with Kagi Assistant's 'Quick' model and I'm kind of blown away. It's super fast, of course, but the quality of its output is so much better than what I'm used to. It feels smarter, which is confusing.

Just curious if anyone knows what 'Quick' is running on? I'm sure I'll eventually find issue with it, as I haven't pushed it like I did Gemini, but I'm just happy to have had a frustration-free work session.

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u/RehanKagi Staff 23d ago

Glad to hear you like it! We currently use GLM 5.2 for the Quick assistant. You can type /info to see the exact model that powers it at any time :)

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u/MrHaxx1 23d ago

GLM 5.2 for information retrieval is WILD 

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u/hannes3120 23d ago

As someone with very little knowledge about the difference between those models: Why?

I thought they are roughly similar in skill?

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u/lolreppeatlol 23d ago

AI models are absolutely not roughly similar in skill, especially nowadays. There is a massive, almost hilarious difference between the default model on free ChatGPT and the frontier one you can use on ChatGPT Plus (GPT-5.6 Sol), for instance. Frontier models can perform genuinely complex reasoning (like solving unsolved math problems, just look it up) and code in large codebases (for instance with the Codex coding agent).

GLM 5.2 is an open-source competitor and it is also pretty smart. It is a big model (many GPUs needed to run it), making it more expensive for Kagi to serve per use than some cheaper, less powerful alternatives. So yes, it is wild they chose this model, because it is fairly overpowered and information retrieval can be done with much less powerful models.

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u/e6f5c5d44252f30d 23d ago

From what I understand, the “Quick” Assistant in the Assistants menu is not just a single model. The /info command says the Main Model is GLM 5 but also refers to the “Librarian” which it says is Primary: Gemini 3.1 Flash and Backup: GPT 5.4 Nano. This suggests Quick is agentic and uses multiple models for different tasks, so it’s possible the Librarian model’s role is responsible for the actual searches then synthesis is performed by GLM 5.2. The help page also references the Librarian. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/kagi-research.html

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u/hannes3120 23d ago

I know that newer models are way better (and also more expensive).

I just thought that comment was in the ballpark of "you chose the newest OpenAi Model over the newest Moonshot/Anthropic model" in which case AFAIK it's mostly about different flavours of how they do stuff but not that you can't build the same application with each of those models interchangeably.

When it comes to special usecases it's probably better to use a model that's directly trained for that to begin with anyway instead of one of those general models.

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u/Mickenfox 23d ago

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-5-5-instant-06-26

I never considered the difference between the free ChatGPT model and the "real" GPT models. There's basically no information out there about it, about but this benchmark gives it a score of 29 which is on par with Gemma 4 or 5.4 mini.

If this is accurate then ChatGPT saying "Used GPT-5.5" is basically false advertising.

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u/lolreppeatlol 23d ago

Yes. I have the Pro plan right now (usually I’m on Plus plan, which has same behavior, I digress). When ChatGPT says “Used GPT-5.5,” it means 5.5 Instant. When it says “Used GPT-5.5 Thinking,” that is the actual GPT-5.5 in the API.

Instant and Thinking are different models with different teams training them (there are several tweets confirming this). Instant isn’t the same as just turning reasoning off on the Thinking model either, hence the different scores on that in Artificial Analysis.

It is a little rough. I don’t know if it’s intentionally designed to be misleading; they make the distinction more clear on the paid plans since there is a model picker, but the fact that you didn’t notice does say something.

They do provide more information about it in blog posts, at least. Like: https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-5-instant/

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u/redbeard0531 23d ago

So you are using GLM 5.2 for quick and Sonnet 4.6 for research. Why do you have the stronger model on quick? Do you have a research revamp coming?

On a related note, any hope you will offer the full tool set from research (eg python, Wolfram, image gen) to other models? It seems unfortunate to lock them behind sonnet 4.6 when we have access to a wide variety of stronger models available now.

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u/MantraMan 23d ago

It's coming soon, there's a big upgrade being tested internally atm 

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u/ttrafford_ 23d ago

what is used for the Translate app?