DuckDuckGo Wants You To Have More Control Over AI

Over the last few years, as LLM technology has advanced, I've tried to spend a bunch of time talking about ways to use the technology properly, mainly in how it can be a user-empowering technology when used as a tool, not to take over work or to tell you what to do or to replace people, but as a kind of assistive technology that helps you do things better.

At the same time, there's been certainly in some corners growing concerns about AI technology, some of which is certainly justified.

I think it's clear that the technology is being extremely overhyped and oversold by some, but that doesn't mean that the tech is useless or should be done away with, not that you could if you wanted to.

I think the bigger and more legitimate concern to me is that if things keep going in the direction they have been going, that we would end up in a world where the tech is only coming from a tiny number of giant tech firms.

And then we're just reinforcing all of the problems that we've had from the last decade plus of just a few giant tech firms, not just having too much power over our lives, but being in a world where they have even more data on us as well in ways that allow them to abuse it and do things that make us all feel somewhat uncomfortable.

Indeed, I actually fear that much of the hatred today directed at AI is more just carryover hatred for big tech companies sucking up all of our data and doing untrustworthy things with it.

In a past podcast, I talked to the CEO of Lex or LexPage, which is an AI assistive writing tool that I use.

And it had two features that I really, really like and hadn't really seen in most other AI products.

One of which was the ability to choose which AI model you wanted to use from a list of about 20.

And the other was the ability to customize and edit the system prompts to create different personas in terms of, you know, who was helping you edit the pieces that you were writing.

This is the kind of thing that most AI companies sort of keep hidden and locked up and which allow them to manipulate the outputs of the AI system that you're using to their own interest rather than yours.

So I was pretty excited to see that DuckDuckGo appears to be following a similar path with its Duck AI system.

If you're listening to this, you obviously are already aware of DuckDuckGo, which makes a bunch of privacy protecting versions of the things that many people rely too heavily on big tech companies for, most notably their search engine, but also privacy protecting browsers and VPN systems and other things as well.

And they recently ventured into the AI space with a tool that does, in some form, both of the things that I really like about Lex.

But more generally for any AI setup, that is not just for writing, like Lex is just a writing tool.

You can select which model you want to use with the Duck AI system.

And they also started offering the ability to customize some elements of the system prompts and create personas that fit with what you want them to do.

So with all of that in mind, I was really excited to get the chance to talk to DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg about what the company is doing in the AI space.