DuckDuckGo has launched AI Chat officially. The feature promises anonymous interactions with several AIs, including GPT 3.5 , Claude 3, or Llama 3.
DuckDuckGo claims that access is free and that all chats are private. The company says that it is anonymizing interactions with the AI models. Furthermore, interactions are not used “for any AI model training”.
Users may communicate with all AIs free of charge. Interactions are, however, limited at this point. DuckDuckGo considers introducing paid plans in the future that increase limits and may give paying customers access to advanced models.
Using DuckDuckGo AI Chat is simple. Visit the startpage of the service and pick one of the available chat models to communicate with. Accept the privacy policy and terms of use on the next page.
The essential points are these:
- DuckDuckGo is not saving or storing user prompts or outputs.
- The company says it has agreements with model providers “to further protect” user privacy.
DuckDuckGo says that chats are anonymous and cannot be traced back to individuals. It achieves this by acting as a proxy. The AI communicates with DuckDuckGo, and thus also a DuckDuckGo IP address, and not the user directly.
Using DuckDuckGo AI Chat
AI Chat works as expected. You type and send the typed text to the AI. It will respond to it and DuckDuckGo shows the output from the AI in the interface.
Options to start the chat over and switch to another of the supported AI models are provided on the chat page.
The current limit is not highlighted on the AI Chat page. This means that you never know when you reach such a limit. You could switch to another AI model then to continue your interaction.
Closing Words
DuckDuckGo AI Chat gives you access to four different AI models at the time. If you trust the company’s claims, you get to interact with all of them anonymously. It is an interesting option to test the different AIs.
What about you? Do you use AI models already? If so, which is your favorite and why?
I occasionally use HuggingChat [https://huggingface.co/chat/] which delivered answers which seemed pertinent to me; it even helped me enhance a userscript. Nothing tremendous I guess compared to what AI chatbots are meant to be able of.
I discovered DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat not long ago, proposed then in its beta stage. I’ve tested it once to know if DDG was able to be called as Google’s CSE (Custom Search Engine) hence displaying results within another domain than itself, and the answer was : No! – Not enough testing to have an idea of this AI Chat.
I’m neither acquainted to AI Chats nor an aficionado of AI, the former maybe explaining the latter. Basically I remain aware of privacy issues given AIs appetite for all data and AI proposed to the masses (or is it imposed?) when on the other hand reserved for science and technology has never bothered me, on the contrary.