This one, called AI Chat, comes courtesy of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that obviously doesn't want to feel left behind in the AI arms race. The company has been testing AI Chat over the last few months, but as of today, it's available to everyone. Unlike other standalone bots like Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT that are powered by their own large language models, DuckDuckGo's AI Chat is not. Instead, think of it as a way to access multiple chatbots in a single place. Right now, AI chat will let you choose between OpenAI's GPT 3.5, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, Meta's Llama 3 and Mistral's Mistral 8x7B, and the company says that more models are coming soon.

Following Microsoft, DuckDuckGo is now tapping OpenAI's ChatGPT technology to streamline its search engine. DuckAssist is a free feature that can pop up when you make a query on the DuckDuckGo search engine. By tapping AI algorithms, DuckAssist can offer a concise answer to your query at the top of the search page, removing the need to scroll through search results and visit a third-party website to find the answer. The approach could kill off traditional search results, like Microsoft is starting to do with the ChatGPT-powered Bing. But for now, DuckAssist's scope has been confined to only citing content from encyclopedia sites Wikipedia and Brittanica.

Everyone wants in on AI these days, and for good reason. AI programs and services are pulling in millions of active users and dominating headlines. ChatGPT alone reached 100 million active users within two months. The latest players in the AI space are search engines, which want to transform traditional "googling" into educational conversations with artificial intelligence. DuckDuckGo is taking a slightly different approach, incorporating AI into search without the chat--instead, offering users clear, concise answers to their queries.

Following the lead of Microsoft and Google, DuckDuckGo is about to dip its toes in generative AI. Instead, DuckDuckGo is partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic to enhance its existing Instant Answer feature. You won't see "DuckAssist" with each and every search you conduct, but when it does appear, the tool will pull from Wikipedia (as well as Encyclopedia Britannica in some instances) to provide a natural language response to your questions. DuckDuckGo is limiting DuckAssist's sourcing to reduce the likelihood of the feature's machine-learning model " hallucinating" or, in other words, providing you with the wrong information. If you see a magic wand icon, it means Duck Assist can summarize information for you.