DuckDuckGo's Building AI-Generated Answers Into Its Search Engine

DuckDuckGo announced a new tool called DuckAssist that "automatically pulls and summarizes information from Wikipedia in response to certain questions," reports The Verge. From the report: DuckAssist's beta is live on the search engine right now -- but only through DuckDuckGo's mobile apps and browser extensions. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, says the company will add it to the web-based search engine if the trial "goes well." When you enter a question that DuckAssist can help with, you'll see a box that says "I can check to see if Wikipedia has relevant info on this topic, just ask" at the very top of your search results. Hit the blue "Ask" button, and you'll get an AI-generated answer using summarized information from Wikipedia. If DuckAssist has already answered a question once before, that response will automatically appear, which means you won't have to "ask" it the same thing multiple times. While the tool's built upon language models from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, and the Google-backed Anthropic, Weinberg says it'll retain the same focus on privacy as DuckDuckGo. According to the announcement, DuckAssist won't share any personally identifiable information with OpenAI and Anthropic, and neither company will use your anonymous questions to train their models. DuckDuckGo says the feature uses the "most recent full Wikipedia download available," which is around a few weeks old, so it might not be able to help if you're searching for something later than that. However, the company plans to update this in the future, as well as add more sources for DuckAssist to draw from.

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