DuckDuckGo does its own ChatGPT

It’s not every day that DuckDuckGo beats its giant rival Google to the punch.

But the scrappy, privacy-minded search engine is the latest to jump on the ChatGPT bandwagon with a new artificial intelligence feature called DuckAssist that taps into the power of language-learning AI systems that can concisely summarize huge troves of online writing.

The new DuckAssist isn’t exactly a conversational chatbot, in the likes of Microsoft’s new Bing search chatbot or Google’s upcoming Bard.

But ask it a question and it will scan Wikipedia and a few other reliable sources and, if it has enough context, will invite you to click on a magic wand icon to generate an explanation.

DuckDuckGo says its new assistant won’t “hallucinate” — confidently providing false information and nonsense — the way other AI language models do because it’s not scanning all of the internet, just a limited and trusted set of information sources.

So far, the new feature is only available on DuckDuckGo smartphone apps and browser extensions. But that’s more than Google has offered with its upcoming limited trial of the Bard chatbot.

In part, that’s because advertising-dependent Google has so much more to lose in replacing links with a chatbot feature that might misinform or offend.