DuckDuckGo continues to beef up its AI features by making Duck.ai more useful with the latest models, all while maintaining user privacy. In its latest update, DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai just got a GPT-4o mini upgrade with web access. This lets users get real-time answers to their questions, including breaking news, product comparisons, sports scores, and more.
The company says users can benefit from up-to-date information without sacrificing privacy. When needed, Duck.ai pulls in live web results, always citing its sources. Users can also manually trigger web access by clicking the globe icon next to an answer on the platform.
For those already familiar with Assist in DuckDuckGo search results, the web answers in Duck.ai will feel familiar. In a blog post, the company reaffirmed its commitment to privacy: “DuckDuckGo’s approach to AI remains the same: private, useful, and optional. Many AI chat services now offer web access, but Duck.ai is designed to deliver it in a uniquely privacy-respecting way by default.”
Even with GPT-4o mini web access, DuckDuckGo emphasizes that Duck.ai is:
- Free to use, with no login or account required
- Fully anonymized via proxying, as the browser hides user IPs and strips metadata
- Chats are never used for AI training by any model provider
- Allows users to have private conversations with the following models: OpenAI’s GPT-4o mini and o3-mini, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3.3 70B, and Mistral AI’s Mistral Small 3 24B
Last month, the company upgraded its DuckDuckGo AI with the ability to switch between AIs mid-conversation. DuckDuckGo explained: “Each model has its own strengths and levels of moderation. With this new feature, much requested by our users, you can compare how the models respond to the same query or switch if you’re unhappy with the first model you chose.”
To use this feature, just head to duck.ai. After chatting with the AI, you can click the repeat button at the top of the chat window to look through other responses.
