Following Microsoft, DuckDuckGo is now tapping OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to streamline its search engine.
DuckAssist is a free feature that can pop up when you make a query on the DuckDuckGo search engine. By tapping AI algorithms, DuckAssist can offer a concise answer to your query at the top of the search page, removing the need to scroll through search results and visit a third-party website to find the answer.
The approach could kill off traditional search results, like Microsoft is starting to do with the ChatGPT-powered Bing. But for now, DuckAssist’s scope has been confined to only citing content from encyclopedia sites Wikipedia and Brittanica.
The company is doing so to prevent DuckAssist from “hallucinating” or making up the answer, and to cut down on the potential for spreading misinformation. Wikipedia is also known to supply largely reliable information that’s frequently updated by users.
“For this initial trial, DuckAssist is most likely to appear in our search results when users search for questions that have straightforward answers in Wikipedia,” CEO Gabriel Weinberg wrote in a post. “Think questions like ‘what is a search engine index?’ rather than more subjective questions like ‘what is the best search engine?’”
That said, DuckDuckGo is warning users that DuckAssist can still generate mistakes. The other problem is that the feature is currently restricted to Wikipedia entries that are “at most a few weeks old,” preventing it from being useful on current events.
In addition, the feature can’t answer follow-up questions. So you won’t be able to hold longer conversations with it, like you can with ChatGPT.
Still, the company has plans to add more information sources to DuckAssist, which is currently in beta. DuckDuckGo says the feature is but one of "a series of generative AI-assisted features” that it hopes to roll out in the coming months.
DuckAssist was built with technology from both OpenAI and Anthropic, another San Francisco company that's also focused on building AI-powered large language models responsibly. Specifically, DuckAssist is tapping OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model, which can power chatbots similar to ChatGPT. According to TechCrunch, DuckDuckGo is also experimenting with using OpenAI’s newer “turbo” GPT 3.5 model, which is 10 times cheaper to run.
DuckAssist is currently available on DuckDuckGo’s apps and browser extensions. There's no need to create an account or sign in, unlike Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing, which currently requires registering on a waitlist.
“If this DuckAssist trial goes well, we will roll it out to all DuckDuckGo search users in the coming weeks,” the company says.