I'm a little confused about what the point of these are compared to the existing features/models that kagi already has. Are they just supposed to be a one-stop shop where I don't have to choose which model to use? When should I use kagi quick/research assistant instead of, e.g. kimi?

I tried the quick assistant a bit (don't have ultimate so I can't try research), and while the writing style seems slightly different, I don't see much difference in information compared to using existing models through the general kagi assistant interface.

Quick assistant is a managed experience, so we can add features to it in a controlled way we can't for all the models we otherwise support at once.

For now Quick assistant has a "fast path" answer for simple queries. We can't support the upgrades we want to add in there on all the models because they differ in tool calling, citation reliability, context window, ability to not hallucinate, etc.

The responding model is currently qwen3-235B from cerebras but we want to decouple the user expectations from that so we can upgrade it down the road to something else. We like Kimi, but couldn't get a stable experience for Quick on it at launch with current providers (tool calling unreliability)