DuckDuckGo enters the world of artificial intelligence chat

MetaversePlanet July 18, 2024

0 2 minutes read

While DuckDuckGo is known as a privacy-focused search engine, it is stepping into the world of artificial intelligence with its new AI Chat tool. With this new tool, users can switch between various models such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral to find the most suitable answer to their questions.

DuckDuckGo announced AI Chat, a chat tool, to stay competitive in the AI race. This new tool has been in testing for the past few months and is now available to everyone. Unlike other standalone bots, AI Chat provides access to multiple chatbots in one place. Currently, you can choose between OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, Anthropic’s Claude 3, Meta’s Llama 3, and Mistral’s Mistral 8x7B models. The company also notes that more models will be added soon.

DuckDuckGo enters the world of artificial intelligence chat

The biggest difference with AI Chat is that users can compare the answers of various large language models. If you don’t like one model’s answer, you can try another model. AI Chat is available for free, but there is a daily usage limit. The company is working on a paid plan that will offer higher usage limits and access to more advanced AI models. AI Chat can be used for various purposes such as asking questions, creating email drafts, writing code, and making travel plans. However, it does not yet have the ability to produce visual content.

DuckDuckGo emphasizes that using AI Chat is more private than using ChatGPT or Claude directly. The company assures users that their questions and the generated answers will not be used to train AI models. Nirzar Pangarkar, lead designer of DuckDuckGo, says that users’ IP addresses are kept private and that requests are made through DuckDuckGo’s IP address. Additionally, this feature can easily be turned off when searching anonymously.

AI Chat is separate from DuckAssist, an AI-assisted summarization feature DuckDuckGo added last year. DuckAssist offers AI-generated summaries from trusted sources, usually from Wikipedia, at the top of search results. Unlike Google’s AI Summaries, which can occasionally provide inaccurate information, DuckAssist relies on more reliable sources. DuckDuckGo considers AI Chat and DuckAssist to complement each other. After using DuckAssist to start a query, AI Chat can be used to better understand what you’re reading or to quickly get direct answers to new questions.

These new tools from DuckDuckGo aim to allow users to benefit from artificial intelligence technologies while protecting their privacy. AI Chat is currently only available in the U.S. and was launched as a subsidiary of the China-based company Yidian. Although there is no direct connection with the app now, one of its main investors is Beijing-based IDG Capital, which has ties to the Chinese military. Former employees claim that most of the algorithms were developed by China-based engineers, although DuckDuckGo advertises itself as a U.S.-based company with U.S. investors. Jeff Zheng, CEO of DuckDuckGo, stated that the app complies with U.S. data and privacy laws and that data is stored on Amazon’s servers in the U.S. Employees in China can only access anonymous data. Despite its connection to China, Reuters found no evidence that DuckDuckGo published news portraying the Chinese government positively.