DuckDuckGo — the privacy-centric web browser — announced Thursday (May 6) the rollout of its AI Chat feature to all users. This feature was previously available to select users in beta access, allowing them to chat with artificial intelligence (AI) models while remaining anonymous. It is now presented for free to all users of restricted web browsers, and a paid plan is also available.
AI Chat on DuckDuckGo
In a blog post, the company announced that AI Chat currently offers support for four AI models (two proprietary and two open source) – Open AI GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B. According to the company, the chats are private and none of them are used to train AI models. The terms and conditions listed by DuckDuckGo mention that because it calls AI models on behalf of users, their personal information such as IP addresses is not exposed.
Furthermore, it is also claimed that users can chat with AI Chat without worrying about their privacy as the conversations are anonymized. DuckDuckGo says it has contracts with AI model providers that limit how much data they can use from anonymous user queries. In addition, the data cannot be used to “develop or improve their models”.
The company claims the agreement also includes deleting all data received within 30 days (with limited exceptions for security and legal compliance). “Chats may be temporarily stored by the underlying model providers, but there is no way to connect them to you personally, as all metadata has been removed,” it claims.
How to use AI Chat
DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat can be accessed through multiple entry points such as URLs as well as shortcuts. After reaching the home page, the user is offered a choice between four AI models. The chat window offers pre-set prompts such as ‘Get computer help’, ‘Understand a topic’ or ‘Write an email’.
Once the conversation is over, the fire button in front of the text box can be used to clear the chat window. If users want to change the AI model, they can click on the AI model name in the left pane and select any of the three other options.
DuckDuckGo says its plan “includes adding more chat models and browser entry points.” A paid subscription plan for AI Chat is also being worked on, as well as the inclusion of more AI models.
