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posted by hubie on Sunday March 12 2023, @04:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-up-with-the-joneses dept.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/wikipedia-ai-truth-duckduckgo-hopes-so-with-new-answerbot/

Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today as a wide beta test for users of DuckDuckGo's browser extensions and browsing apps. Being powered by an AI model, the company admits that DuckAssist might make stuff up but hopes it will happen rarely.

Here's how it works: If a DuckDuckGo user searches a question that can be answered by Wikipedia, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to generate a brief summary of what it finds in Wikipedia, with source links listed below. The summary appears above DuckDuckGo's regular search results in a special box.

[...] Update (March 9, 2023): We spoke with a representative of DuckDuckGo and they said they're using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Anthropic's Claude as LLMs. "We're experimenting with OpenAI's recently announced Turbo model, too," they said.

Related:
Robots Let ChatGPT Touch the Real World Thanks to Microsoft (Article has a bunch of other SoylentNews related links as well.)


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 13 2023, @03:48PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 13 2023, @03:48PM (#1295912) Journal
    It's the McDonalds ice cream effect. They can't change the price, but they can shave cents off the cost of the ice cream cone by reducing quality in relatively hidden and incremental ways (like smaller portion sizes, lower quality cone wafers, and more air in the ice cream mix). We can't point to any obvious point in the process where it got worse, but if you compare quality of the product years apart, you can see that something happened.

    Here, they're probably doing less extensive and focused searching behind the scenes to reduce costs. It's also possible that a decade of fighting search engine optimization has crippled the search functionality too.