DuckDuckGo, the 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.
Interactions on Duck.ai are private because “neither DuckDuckGo nor chatbot providers can use user data to train their models,” the company said. They are also anonymous because DuckDuckGo does not require users to set up accounts or provide personal information before interacting with it.
DuckDuckGo even removes metadata such as server or IP addresses, so requests appear to come from the company rather than individual users.
Although the commercial AI chatbot vendors it supports—OpenAI and Anthropic—keep access logs, DuckDuckGo says it “has agreements with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are completely deleted by the providers within 30 days. Chats on our platform are not used to train or improve the models.” They can be used.
It makes maintaining privacy easier than changing privacy settings for each service.
Duck.ai has a simple and clean user interface and allows users to choose from two commercial, closed source models and two open source models. Closed source models include OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, which until recently powered the free version of ChatGPT, and Cloud3 Haiku, Anthropic's minimal version of the Cloud3 model. The open source models are the Meta Lama-3 70b and the Mistral AI hybrid professional model Mistral 8x7b.
DuckDuckGo says it will add more models in the future, further expanding the options available to users.
This new service joins Venice AI, which was recently launched by crypto founder Eric Voorhees, and is a welcome addition to privacy-conscious individuals. Venice AI features an uncensored AI chatbot and image generator that doesn't require an account and doesn't capture data.
Which AI tool to use? 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 Hermes and Dog LMM. DuckDuckGo offers additional functionality to browser users, including DuckAssist, an integrated assistant that is being built into a native AI companion.
However, Venice AI offers a wide range of generative image models that DuckDuckGo doesn't, and its models are uncensored in both text and image generation, a big point over its competitors.
The DuckDuckGo AI service is free to use “within a daily limit”. The company has stated that it is considering launching a paid tier to reduce or eliminate these limits, just like Cloud, OpenEye and even Venice.
DuckDuckGo says its AI chat service is an additional partner to the search engine, not just a hype-based experiment.
“We see AI chat and search as two different but powerful tools for finding what you're looking for — especially when you're looking for a new topic,” the company said. “If you start with search, you may want to switch to AI Chat for follow-up queries to help you understand what you're reading, or for quick, direct answers to new questions not covered in your web pages. i saw”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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