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DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

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Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#71
post #41

Hi all, I'm the author of this post (and the CEO/Founder of DuckDuckGo). Happy to take a few questions about how DuckAssist works, but to clarify what I think may be some confusion from the other comments, we're not just asking a LLM to summarize Wikipedia from its training, nor did we train an LLM on Wikipedia -- instead, we use our own Wikipedia index to pull out the relevant sentences, and then ask the LLM to veri…

> and then ask the LLM to verify the answer is in the sentences

How can you ask the LLM whether the answer is in the sentences without leaking the user's question?

Let's take a concrete example: if I ask "Is ADHD caused by non-genetic factors?", what does the LLM see? It's not clear how OpenAI does not learn from this example that user X is more likely to have/know someone with ADHD.

Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#72
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "at least here"? What's wrong with other usage? They are using OpenAI so they haven't trained it themselves and is just inputting the Wikipedia article as a prompt. I don't see how that is more respectable than literally every other service built on OpenAI.

Right in the release: 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. 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…

You misunderstand how this works. They do not train it on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia article is part of the prompt. You can do this yourself by copy-pasting a Wikipedia article into ChatGPT and ask a question about it. The underlying LLM is still GPT-3 and trained on everything on internet.

Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#73
post #41

Hi all, I'm the author of this post (and the CEO/Founder of DuckDuckGo). Happy to take a few questions about how DuckAssist works, but to clarify what I think may be some confusion from the other comments, we're not just asking a LLM to summarize Wikipedia from its training, nor did we train an LLM on Wikipedia -- instead, we use our own Wikipedia index to pull out the relevant sentences, and then ask the LLM to veri…

> and then ask the LLM to verify the answer is in the sentences How can you ask the LLM whether the answer is in the sentences without leaking the user's question? Let's take a concrete example: if I ask "Is ADHD caused by non-genetic factors?", what does the LLM see? It's not clear how OpenAI does not learn from this example that user X is more likely to have/know someone with ADHD.

From the post, "As with all other third parties we work with, we do not share any personally identifiable information like your IP address. Additionally, our anonymous queries will not be used to train their AI models. And anything you share via the anonymous feedback link goes to us and us alone."

Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the article doesn't say how its trained.

Yes it does: If you enter a question that can be answered by Wikipedia into our search box, DuckAssist may appear and use AI natural language technology to anonymously generate a brief, sourced summary of what it finds in Wikipedia — right above our regular private search results.

That just means the initial prompt says something like, "You are an expert Wikipedia research assistant. You can only reference material found on Wikipedia. Try your best to help the user by giving summaries of Wikipedia content. Do not reference material from other websites!"

The model is still trained on a broad corpus like ChatGPT3, i.e., the Internet. The corpus of Wikipedia alone probably isn't enough training data.

Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#75
Meh, DuckDuckGo has lost its appeal when they started openly censoring search results, despite the fact that they aren't even using their own search engine under the hood.

I expect their AI to be heavily lobotomized to the point of being completely useless.

Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#76
post #62
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine the disasters that would result from getting answers from a search engine instead of human-written documents. Maybe it's an inconvenience to get the wrong showtimes for a movie but what about when you're asking about the weather on your long distance hiking trip? Whether it's legal for you to carry your gun on your trip downtown? This is going to cause so much damage.

That depends on the humans writing. ChatGPT has its faults, but it's got a better hit rate than people. > A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Can't get too much worse than thousands dying from a virus that has a vaccine because they're off drinking bleach and horse dewormer.

It clearly can given that some people still believe - or at least pretend to do so for the purpose of spreading propaganda - that people have been drinking bleach even without the 'assistance' of LLM propaganda machines to spread these false narratives.

And that horse dewormer? That is just ivermectin in a paste base (e.g. hydroxypropyl cellulose and castor wax) where the human version is ivermectin with a filler-diluent, probably lactose, microcrystalline cellulose or starch. There is no special 'veterinary ivermectin factory', just some factories which use the same ivermectin as used for humans which they then mix with a paste base. I'm not convinced ivermectin actually is effective as a prophylactic against or treatment for SARS2 but it is known that it shows antiviral activity. I am fully convinced that it has far fewer and far less serious side effects than the experimental vaccines which were pushed past the traditional safeguards. I am reasonably convinced those vaccines were not effective against the later strains of SARS2 - Delta and Omicron and whatever came/comes after - so it is likely that the 'boosters' actually caused more damage than they have avoided given the fact that these were administered when the bulk of the infections were caused by Delta and Omicron.

It will take a long time for the narratives (plural, both from the 'follow the leader' as well as the 'my body my choice' side of the population) to subside so that something resembling the objective truth may be discerned so we´ll just have to be patient until then.

Re: DuckDuckGo Launches DuckAssist

#77
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "hurdling towards". All's it takes is a quick search on Bingle Duck Jeeves! to know that fact. Do you're research :)

hurtle: to move with great speed, or to fling with great force. hurdle: to leap over something, or to overcome an obstacle. If you hurdle towards things with great speed I admire your dexterity. I'll stick with hurtling, thanks. Edit: can I assume that "you're" entire comment was deliberate?

Yes, you can :)
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