It's been a little over a month since a server discovered we DuckDuckGo was offering the possibility of using an AI chatbot without registration on its website. It was in beta phase, and we could choose the GPT-3.5 Turbo or Claude 3 models. Now, the company posted an article on its blog announcing its availability, and although the number of available models has increased, the beta label has not yet fallen off.
The name is something that has also been kept: DuckDuckGo AI Chat. Like everything this duck does, the intention is that we can chat with artificial intelligence models with complete privacy, so it does not require registration and no information is saved. At the moment we can use the GTP-3.5 Turbo from OpenAI (ChatGPT), Claude 3 Haiku from Anthropic, Llama 3 from Meta and Mixtral 8x7B from Mistral, and the list will soon increase.
What DuckDuckGo AI Chat offers
Now that there is an official note, it can be confirmed that DuckDuckGo AI chat offers:
- The chats are private, made anonymous by them and are not used to train any artificial intelligence model.
- Chat can be accessed from duck.ai, duckduckgo.com/chat and in search results from the Chat tab. Also making use of the !ai and !chat bangs that we will talk about later.
- Improvements are expected. On the roadmap they have more models and browser entry points.
- They are considering launching a payment model to increase usage limits and be able to use more advanced models.
About the bangs, you can use the aforementioned !ai and !chat, which will open a chat window with a text if we have added it behind the bang. The query is not sent directly; You have to press Enter twice if we want it to respond if we use this method.
DuckDuckGo AI Chat has certain limits, and it is something to take into account. If we spend a while chatting with them, or ask for a lot of help to complete a task, the limit will jump without warning and could leave us hanging. This can happen with any other AI of this type, but it wouldn't hurt to know this detail before we stumble upon it, and that's why I explain it. One of the improvements that would be obtained with the paid version would be to be able to increase interactions.
All private
The company created this chat to protect our privacy. By one information According to Pew Research Center, American adults are concerned about privacy when using AI. 81% say companies will use the information they collect from these chats in ways they are not comfortable with or in ways they are not familiar with. In addition, there are people who are using this type of chat to do their jobs, so it does not seem like the best idea that no one can access this information. That's why DuckDuckGo AI Chat exists: so we can get this kind of help without having to, pardon the expression, sell our soul to the devil.
The way to protect our privacy is the same as the one they use in the search engine: they call the chat completely eliminating the IP and using DDG's. In this way, what we send reaches them from somewhere else. There is also a button to destroy chats, and conversations are not stored. Reading this, and in theory, the information does reach companies like OpenAI or Meta, so I wouldn't introduce anything really sensitive that I don't want to share with anyone even if it doesn't come from me.
Personally, lately I tend to use DuckDuckGo AI Chat instead of ChatGPT, partly to avoid consuming the limits of OpenAI's GTP-4o. The results are the same as those offered by ChatGPT before updating its model, and if I gain privacy along the way, all the better. The duck, once again, protecting our privacy.