DuckDuckGo, known for its privacy-focused search engine and web browser, has announced a new service that allows users to interact privately and anonymously with popular AI chatbots. The service, called DuckDuckGo AI Chat and accessible on Duck.ai, is now available globally.
Conversations on Duck.ai are private because “neither DuckDuckGo nor chatbot providers can use user data to train their models,” the company explains. They're also anonymous, because DuckDuckGo doesn't require users to set up accounts, or provide personal information before starting a conversation with it.
DuckDuckGo even removes metadata such as server or IP addresses, so that queries appear to originate from the company rather than individual users.
Although the supported commercial AI chatbot providers — OpenAI and Anthropic — keep access logs, DuckDuckGo says it has “contracts with all model providers to ensure that the providers do 30 Any archived chats are deleted completely within days, and any of these chats on our platform can be used to train or improve models.
This makes protecting privacy easier than changing privacy settings for each service.
Duck.ai has a light and clean user interface and lets users choose between two commercial, closed-source models and two open-source models. Closed-source models are OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, which recently powered the free version of ChatGPT, and Claude 3 Haiku, Anthropic's smaller version of its Claude 3 model. 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 is a welcome addition for privacy-conscious individuals, including the recent launch of Venice AI by crypto founder Erik Voorhees. Venus AI is an uncensored AI chatbot and image generator that doesn't require accounts and doesn't retain data.
As for using the AI tool? It depends on your needs.
In terms of text generation, DuckDuckGo's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 3 Haiku offerings are superior to Venice's Hermes and Dogge LLM. DuckDuckGo also provides additional functionality for its browser users, including DuckAssist, an integrated assistant that is being developed into a native AI companion.
However, Venice AI offers a wider set of generative image models, which DuckDuckGo does not, and its models are uncensored, both in text and image generations which is a key point against its competitors.
DuckDuckGo's AI service is free to use “within a daily limit.” The company said it is considering launching a paid tier to reduce or eliminate these limitations, similar to Cloud, OpenAI, and even Venus.
DuckDuckGo said its AI chat service is a complementary partner to its search engine and not just a hype-driven experience.
“We see AI chat and search as two different but powerful tools to help you find what you're looking for,” the company said. “If you start with search, So you might want to switch to AI Chat for follow-up questions to review what you've read, or for quick, direct answers to new questions that weren't covered on your web pages. saw.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.