DuckDuckGo's AI beats Perplexity in one big way - and it's free to use

GK Hart/Vikki Hart/Getty Images I've been a fan of DuckDuckGo for a long time. I find the search engine to be far more trustworthy than Google and I do enjoy my privacy. But when I heard that the company was dipping its webbed feet into the AI waters, my initial reaction was a roll of the eyes. Then I gave Duck.ai a go -- and was immediately impressed. (DuckDuck Go's AI features launched in June 2024 and came out of beta last week.) Also: How to use ChatGPT to write code - and my favorite trick to debug what it generates Duck.ai does something that other similar products don't -- it gives you a choice. You can choose between the proprietary GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, and Claude 3 services or go open-source with Llama 3.3 and Mistral Small 3. Duck.ai is also private: All of your queries are anonymized by DuckDuckGo, so you can be sure no third-party will ever have access to your AI chats. After giving Duck.ai a trial over the weekend, I found myself favoring it more and more over Perple ... Read full article.