DuckDuckGo now has its own generative AI, DuckAssist, because of course it does

For the past several weeks, "generative AI" has been the new buzzword in the tech industry. We have seen Google and Microsoft announce, and in Microsoft's case, release, their Bard and Bing Chat services. We have seen other companies coming out with large language generative AI as well, including Snapchat, and even Slack. The latest company to join this rush is the search engine and browser service DuckDuckGo.

In a blog post today, the company announced DuckAssist, which is currently available in beta for its browsing apps and browser extensions. Here's a quick summary of the AI:

If you enter a question that can be answered by Wikipedia into our search box, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to anonymously generate a brief, sourced summary of what it finds in Wikipedia — right above our regular private search results.

If this trial version for the browsing apps and extensions does well, DuckAssist will be expanded to all of its search users in the near future. It doesn't require a login and is anonymous, with the company promising that any results from DuckAssist won't be used to train its AI model. As with other similar services, DuckDuckGo says that DuckAssist will likely make some mistakes in its answers. If users don't want to see these answers, they can disable “Instant Answers” in the browser and browser extension search settings

DuckDuckGo added that DuckAssist is going to be the first in a series of services and apps that will use generative AI technology. It will be interesting to see how it will compete with Microsoft and Google's solutions.