DuckDuckGo – the web browser with privacy at its centre – announced the rollout of its AI Chat feature to all users on Thursday (May 6). This feature was previously available to select users in beta access, enabling them to converse with artificial intelligence (AI) models while keeping anonymity. It has now been introduced to all users of the web browser for free with limited access while there’s a paid plan available too.
In a blog post, the company announced that AI Chat currently offers support for four AI models (two proprietary and two open-sourced) – Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3, and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B. As per the claims made by the company, the chats are private and none of them are used for training the AI models. The terms and conditions listed by DuckDuckGo mention that since it calls the AI models on the user’s behalf, their personal information such as IP addresses are not exposed.
Furthermore, it is also claimed that users can have conversations with the AI Chat without worrying about their privacy as the conversations are anonymised. DuckDuckGo says it has agreements with the providers of the AI models which limits how much data they can use from users’ anonymous prompts. Additionally, the data cannot be used to “develop or improve their models”.
The company claims the agreement also includes the deletion of all the received data within 30 days (with limited exceptions for safety and legal compliance). “The underlying model providers may store chats temporarily, but there’s no way for them to tie chats back to you, personally, since all metadata is removed”, it is claimed.
How to use AI Chat
DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat can be accessed through multiple entry points such as URLs as well as shortcuts. Upon reaching the homepage, the user is provided with a choice of the four AI models. The chat window offers preset prompts such as ‘Get computer help’, ‘Understand a topic’, or ‘Write an email’.
Once the conversation is over, the fire button before the text box can be used to clear the chat window. If users wish 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 roadmap includes “includes adding more chat models and browser entry points.” It is also working on a paid subscription plan for AI Chat, as well as the inclusion of more AI models.
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