As helpful as they are, AI chatbots can be a privacy nightmare for potential users. Internet privacy company DuckDuckGo (DDG) hopes to change that with its new DuckDuckGo AI Chat, an anonymous way to access popular chatbots currently including Open AI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and two open-source models — Meta Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B.
The feature is accessible on DuckDuckGo’s search engine and can easily be switched off. It’s also free to use within a daily limit. The company claims that the chats are private, anonymised by them, and aren’t used for any AI model training.
Additionally, improvements are already on the way, with more chat models and browser entry points. A paid plan with a higher daily limit and access to more advanced models is also possible.
Similar to how search queries work on DuckDuckGo, the AI Chat feature also calls the aforementioned AI models on your behalf instead of having the user interact directly with them. This approach removes the user’s IP address from the equation, which DDG’s IP address replaces. To the AI model, it appears the queries are coming from DDG instead of the user. DDG provides a fire button to delete the current conversation, similar to its browser.
DDG also claims that it doesn’t save or store any chats; that said, the announcement states that “to respond with answers and ensure all systems are working, the underlying model providers may store chats temporarily.” However, since all metadata will be removed from the web requests, there’s no way the chats can be traced back to the user.
DDG also has agreements with all the model providers, ensuring that all collected data is deleted within 30 days and that none of the chats made on its platform can be used to train or improve the models in question.
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