#Summarize bot series#

But it won't be perfect, and CEO Weinberg admits it: 'Nonetheless, DuckAssist won’t generate accurate answers all of the time. And DuckDuckGo puts the burden of fact-checking on the user, providing a source link below the AI-generated result that can be used to examine its accuracy. While relying on a quality source of information may reduce errors from false information in the AI's dataset, it may not reduce false inferences.

On this point, DuckDuckGo hopes to avoid hallucinations by leaning heavily on Wikipedia as a source: 'by asking DuckAssist to only summarize information from Wikipedia and related sources,' Weinberg writes, 'the probability that it will “hallucinate”-that is, just make something up-is greatly diminished.'

#Summarize bot series#

We have reached out to DuckDuckGo for clarification on this point as well.ĭuckDuckGo calls DuckAssist 'the first in a series of generative AI-assisted features we hope to roll out in the coming months.' If the launch goes well-and nobody breaks it with adversarial prompts-DuckDuckGo plans to roll out the feature to all search users 'in the coming weeks.' DuckDuckGo: Risk of hallucinations “greatly diminished”įurther Reading “Sorry in advance!” Snapchat warns of hallucinations with new AI conversation bot But reading between the lines, it appears that only the Wikipedia article (or excerpt of one) gets sent to OpenAI for summarization, not the user's search itself. If DuckDuckGo is using OpenAI's GPT-3 or ChatGPT API, one might worry that the site could potentially send each user's query to OpenAI every time it gets invoked.

'We also keep your search and browsing history anonymous to our search content partners,' Weinberg writes, 'in this case, OpenAI and Anthropic, used for summarizing the Wikipedia sentences we identify.'

Since DuckDuckGo's main selling point is privacy, the company says that DuckAssist is 'anonymous' and emphasizes that it does not share search or browsing history with anyone. Because we’re using natural language technology from OpenAI and Anthropic to summarize what we find in Wikipedia, these answers should be more directly responsive to your actual question than traditional search results or other Instant Answers. DuckAssist answers questions by scanning a specific set of sources-for now that’s usually Wikipedia, and occasionally related sites like Britannica-using DuckDuckGo’s active indexing.