
Weinberg explained that the current agreement “prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties” but the company is working hard to change the requirements.

But we’ve taken on that challenge because it makes for better privacy, and faster downloads.” What you can do about itĭuckDuckGo is working toward removing the clause from its contract with Microsoft. In a statement to and posted on Reddit, Weinberg says the tracking in question “is another above-and-beyond protection that most browsers don’t even attempt to do for web protection - stopping third-party tracking scripts from even loading on third-party websites - because this can easily cause websites to break. “For ads, we worked with Microsoft to make ad clicks protected,” he said. DuckAssist is available now to test via the company’s browsing apps and extensions.DuckDuckGo confirmed the tracking, with CEO and Founder Gabriel Weinberg explaining on Twitter that DuckDuckGo search results are entirely anonymous, including ads. While further details on DuckDuckGo’s future AI plans weren’t forthcoming, the search engine did note that DuckAssist is more likely to appear in search results for questions that have clear answers that could be provided by Wikipedia or similar, and that objective queries were more likely to produce a DuckAssist response. “We wanted DuckAssist to be the first because we think it can immediately help users find answers to what they are looking for faster.” “This is the first in a series of generative AI-assisted features we hope to roll out in the coming months,” according to a company blog post. But it’s step one of a broader plan to use AI in search, according to DuckDuckGo.

It’s also being phased in across the search engine, so it might not pop up for all applicable queries right away. Claude is a large language model designed as a competitor to ChatGPT, which adds restrictions designed to limit harmful or inaccurate responses.ĭuckDuckGo warned that DuckAssist is a work in progress, and might not generate accurate answers 100% of the time. The company said that DuckAssist uses the Davinci AI large language model from OpenAI - not ChatGPT itself - as well as the Claude model from AI firm Anthropic.ĭavinci is the most powerful and feature-rich of OpenAI’s four AI large language models, though it suffers in processing speed next to more streamlined models like Babbage and Ada, according to OpenAI’s documentation.
