DuckDuckGo, known for its privacy-focused search engine and web browser, announced a new service that allows users to interact privately and anonymously with its popular AI chatbot. The service, called DuckDuckGo AI Chat, is available from Duck.ai and is now available globally.
Duck.ai’s interactions are “private because neither DuckDuckGo nor the chatbot provider can use user data to train models,” the company explains. Plus, DuckDuckGo is anonymous because it doesn’t require users to provide any personal information before setting up an account or starting to interact.
DuckDuckGo also removes metadata, such as server or IP addresses, so it looks like the query came from the company itself rather than an individual user.
Supported commercial AI chatbot providers, OpenAI and Anthropic, keep access logs, but DuckDuckGo “has agreements with all of our model providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted by the provider within 30 days, and that any chats made on our platform will not contain any of our models.” It can be used to train or improve.”
This makes protecting your privacy easier than changing the privacy settings for each service.
Duck.ai has a lightweight, clean user interface that allows users to choose between two commercial, closed-source and two open-source models. The closed source models are OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo, which until recently supported the free version of ChatGPT, and Claude 3 Haiku, a smaller version of Anthropic’s Claude 3 model. The open source models are Meta’s Llama-3 70Bn and Mistral AI’s Mixture of Expert model Mixtral 8x7b.
DuckDuckGo said it will add more models in the future, further expanding the range of options available to users.
This new service joins Crypto founder Erik Voorhees’ recently launched Venice AI and is a welcome addition for privacy-conscious individuals. Venice AI features an uncensored AI chatbot and image generator that doesn’t require an account and doesn’t retain any data.
Which AI tools will you use? It depends on your needs.
In terms of text generation, DuckDuckGo’s GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 3 Haiku products are superior to Venice’s Hermes and Dogge LLM. DuckDuckGo also offers additional features to browser users, including DuckAssist, an integrated assistant in development as a native AI companion.
However, Venice AI offers a rich set of generative image models that DuckDuckGo does not, and its models are less censored in both text and image generation compared to its competitors.
DuckDuckGo’s AI service can be used for free within a daily limit. The company said it is considering launching paid tiers similar to Claude, OpenAI, and even Venice to reduce or eliminate these limitations.
DuckDuckGo said its AI Chat service is not just a hype experiment, but a complementary partner to the search engine.
“We see AI Chat and Search as two different but powerful tools that help users find what they’re looking for, especially when exploring new topics,” the company said. “If you start with a search, you might want to turn to AI Chat for follow-up queries that help you understand what you read, or you might want a quick, direct answer to a new question that wasn’t covered on the web page. I saw.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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