DuckDuckGo Now Lets You Stay Anonymous While Talking To AI Chatbots

Image via Spread Privacy

DuckDuckGo, the search engine renowned for safeguarding user anonymity, has spread its wings to bring the same peace of mind to users in the age of artificial intelligence chatbots. Its new feature, DuckDuckGo AI Chat, lets you interact with several third-party large language models (LLMs) while respecting your privacy.

Unlike many AI chat experiences, DuckDuckGo prioritizes users’ boundaries over data collection. The company assures visitors that their chats are not recorded or stored, and their conversations are not used to train future iterations of the chat models, either by DuckDuckGo or the underlying model providers. Those who are extra cautious can click on a ‘fire’ button to purge their entire chat.

So how does it work? DuckDuckGo acts as an intermediary, anonymizing user data before prompting the chosen LLM. This means that conversations with AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo or Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku appear to originate from DuckDuckGo itself, not individual users. This ensures that no personal information is ever revealed. The open-source Llama 3 by Meta and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B are also in the mix, with more chatbots being integrated in the near future.

Beyond its robust privacy features, DuckDuckGo AI Chat boasts a user-friendly interface and the ability to interact with multiple LLMs. Users can choose from a growing selection of models, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. This allows for a more nuanced exploration of AI capabilities, with users potentially finding an LLM that best suits their needs.

DuckDuckGo AI Chat can be found under the ‘Chat’ tab of your search results page, or by heading over to duck.ai or duckduckgo.com/chat. You can also fire up the feature by entering “!ai” or “!chat” into the search field.

[via ArsTechnica and 9to5Mac, cover image via Spread Privacy]