Dustin Moskovitz, CEO and co-founder of Asana, is stepping down and will transition to the role of Chair once a new CEO is appointed. "As I reflect on my journey since co-founding Asana nearly 17 years ago, I'm filled with immense gratitude," Moskovitz said in a statement. "Creating and leading Asana has been more than just building a company -- it's been a profound privilege to work alongside some of the most talented minds in the industry." Asana's stock price was down more than 25% following the news. CNBC reports: Asana said fourth-quarter sales rose 10% year over year to $188.3 million, which was in line with analysts' estimates. The company said its adjusted earnings per share was breakeven, ahead of analysts' estimates of a loss of one cent per share. Asana said it expects fiscal first-quarter revenue of $184.5 million to $186.5 million, trailing analysts' expectations of $191 million.

Moskovitz owns about 53% of the company's outstanding shares, between his Class A and Class B holdings. He has substantially increased his ownership since the company's public market debut in 2020. [...] Moskovitz said in his Monday retirement statement that he plans to focus more on his philanthropic endeavors, such as Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy, which cites "potential risks from advanced AI" among its various focus areas. In 2010, Moskovitz signed the Giving Pledge, a promise by some of the wealthiest people in the world to donate most of their fortunes to charity.

Sony is working on a prototype AI-powered version of at least one its PlayStation game characters. The Verge: An anonymous tipster has shared an internal video from Sony's PlayStation group with The Verge that demonstrates an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West. The video is narrated by Sharwin Raghoebardajal, a director of software engineering at Sony Interactive Entertainment who works on video game technology, AI, computer vision, and face technology for Sony's PlayStation Studios Advanced Technology Group.

Raghoebardajal demonstrates an AI-powered version of Aloy that can hold a conversation with a player through voice prompts during gameplay. Aloy can be seen responding to queries with an AI-powered synthesized voice and facial movements, both in a demo setting and within the full Horizon Forbidden West game. Raghoebardajal makes it clear this is just a prototype that has been developed alongside Guerrilla Games to demonstrate the technology internally at Sony.

Apple has pulled an iPhone 16 ad featuring a "more personal Siri" after delaying Apple Intelligence features originally planned for iOS 18. The now-private video starred actor Isabella Ramsey demonstrating contextual awareness capabilities. Apple stated the delayed features, including personal context and improved app integration, will release "in the coming year," while Bloomberg reports some Apple AI staff believe these features might be completely rebuilt.

Sony has removed more than 75,000 AI-generated deepfake songs mimicking artists including Harry Styles and Beyonce from online platforms, the company revealed in a submission to the UK government, adding this likely represents just a fraction of fake songs circulating online.

The proliferation of these unauthorized AI replicas has caused "direct commercial harm to legitimate recording artists, including UK artists," Sony stated. The company's intervention comes as Britain considers new copyright legislation that would permit AI companies to train models using artist material, a proposal that would require rights holders to opt out rather than requiring permission.

Nearly one in four U.S. tech jobs posted in 2025 require AI skills, according to data from the University of Maryland's AI job tracker, as companies across sectors adapt to the technology.

Companies across healthcare, retail and utilities are increasingly seeking candidates who can integrate AI into existing roles rather than creating entirely new positions, with these skills commanding premium pay and greater job security.

The information sector leads with 36% of IT jobs in January seeking AI expertise, followed by finance and professional services firms. AI-related listings account for 1.3% of all job postings nationwide. New AI job postings surged 68% since ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 through end-2024, while tech postings overall fell 27% during the same period.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AI excels at following instructions -- but it's not pushing the boundaries of knowledge, says Thomas Wolf. The chief science officer and cofounder of Hugging Face, an open-source AI company backed by Amazon and Nvidia, analyzed the limits of large language models. He wrote that the field produces "overly compliant helpers" rather than revolutionaries. Right now, AI isn't creating new knowledge, Wolf wrote. Instead, it's just filling in the blanks between existing facts -- what he called "manifold filling."

Wolf argues that for AI to drive real scientific breakthroughs, it needs to do more than retrieve and synthesize information. AI should question its own training data, take counterintuitive approaches, generate new ideas from minimal input, and ask unexpected questions that open new research paths. Wolf also weighed in on the idea of a "compressed 21st century" -- a concept from an October essay by Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, "Machine of Loving Grace." Amodei wrote that AI could accelerate scientific progress so much that discoveries expected over the next 100 years could happen in just five to 10.

"I read this essay twice. The first time I was totally amazed: AI will change everything in science in five years, I thought!" Wolf wrote on X. "Re-reading it, I realized that much of it seemed like wishful thinking at best." Unless AI research shifts gears, Wolf warned, we won't get a new Albert Einstein in a data center -- just a future filled with "yes-men on servers."

Nominated for 10 Oscars, The Brutalist (directed and produced by Brady Corbet) has an "intriguing and controversial technical feature," according to the Baffler, that threatens to turn movie-viewing into "a drab appreciation of machine-managed flawlessness, and acting less interesting..." In January, the film's editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth's wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked "for months" with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used "in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy...." Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don't tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what's at issue here....

AI seems poised to decimate the voice acting industry; how long will it be before filmmakers give up on the whole time-wasting business of dialect coaching and language research and toss their performers' untrained vocalizations directly into the linguistic Instant Pot...? "Adrien and Felicity's performances are completely their own," Corbet has argued. Only, they're not. Brody and Jones's performances may now be authentic to spoken Hungarian, but they're no longer authentic to themselves: at least in the parts of the film with Hungarian dialogue, the acting stands more as a monument to the prowess of the voice-matching software than that of the actors...

AI is a different beast from color film, or the Louma crane, or the hand-held camera: it's steroidal, aesthetically corrupting, and unlike these earlier advances it confronts the filmmaker with real ethical questions... Use implies complicity. To incorporate AI into the production of art today, no matter how sparingly or subtly, is to endorse Silicon Valley's politics and worldview: its exploitation of both producers and "users," its blithe indifference to the social impact of post-automation layoffs and the environmental assault of industrial data processing, its cramped and uninteresting idea of imagination, its petrification of creation. It's a vote for the assholes...
In short, the essays calls this "recourse to corrective AI" a "filmmaking prosthesis that cheats the viewer and cheapens the performances." And ironically this clashes with the film's depiction of a "principled artist," according to the article. ("Some of the 'retro' digital renderings in the memorial video included in this scene were also, Corbet has admitted, produced with the help of AI.")

The essay notes that several of 2024's other Oscar-nominated films also employed Respeecher, including Dune: Part Two and Emilia Pérez. "What matters here is not this particular infraction but the precedent it sets, the course it establishes for culture."

Adafruit Industries used large language model (LLM) tool Claude Code to streamline hardware development, writes managing director ptorrone.

In a demo video Limor 'Ladyada' Fried compares the LLM's command-line interface to working with the build-automation tool CMake or "a weird cross between IRC and a BBS." The first step was converting a PDF of the hardware's datasheet into text, and Claude Code first displays the appropriate Bash command, while asking "Do you want to proceed?" ("What's nice is that it doesn't make changes, even though it has write access to files in the directory...") Eventually from the data sheet it creates things like an accurate register map, C++ headers, and even license text — and more.

"We are using it to automate parts of the coding and debugging process for an Arduino-compatible Metro Mini board with an OPT 4048 color sensor," writes ptorrone: Using Claude Code's shell access, we can compile, upload, and test code in a semi-automated workflow, allowing the LLM to suggest fixes for errors along the way... While the AI isn't perfect for high-level driver development, it's proving VERY useful for tedious debugging and super-fast iterative improvements, bringing hardware automation closer to ...reality.
In the video Fried describes it like this. "I have a full debugging cycle, where I'm there — I'm like driving the car — but I have this copilot that's telling me where to go..."

"I feel like I'm getting closer to having a semi-automated way of doing driver development."

Philosophy/ethics professor Troy Jollimore looks at the implications of a world where many students are submitting AI-generated essays. ("Sometimes they will provide quotations, giving page numbers that, as often as not, do not seem to correspond to anything in the actual world...") Ideally if the students write the essays themselves, "some of them start to feel it. They begin to grasp that thinking well, and in an informed manner, really is different from thinking poorly and from a position of ignorance. That moment, when you start to understand the power of clear thinking, is crucial.

"The trouble with generative AI is that it short-circuits that process entirely." One begins to suspect that a great many students wanted this all along: to make it through college unaltered, unscathed. To be precisely the same person at graduation, and after, as they were on the first day they arrived on campus. As if the whole experience had never really happened at all. I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It's not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by AI — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading, or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course...

It's other things too... The students who beg you to reconsider the zero you gave them in order not to lose their scholarship. (I want to say to them: Shouldn't that scholarship be going to ChatGPT?â) It's also, and especially, the students who look at you mystified. The use of AI already seems so natural to so many of them, so much an inevitability and an accepted feature of the educational landscape, that any prohibition strikes them as nonsensical. Don't we instructors understand that today's students will be able, will indeed be expected, to use AI when they enter the workforce? Writing is no longer something people will have to do in order to get a job.

Or so, at any rate, a number of them have told me. Which is why, they argue, forcing them to write in college makes no sense. That mystified look does not vanish — indeed, it sometimes intensifies — when I respond by saying: Look, even if that were true, you have to understand that I don't equate education with job training.

What do you mean? they might then ask.

And I say: I'm not really concerned with your future job. I want to prepare you for life...

My students have been shaped by a culture that has long doubted the value of being able to think and write for oneself — and that is increasingly convinced of the power of a machine to do both for us. As a result, when it comes to writing their own papers, they simply disregard it. They look at instructors who levy such prohibitions as irritating anachronisms, relics of a bygone, pre-ChatGPT age.... As I go on, I find that more of the time, energy, and resources I have for teaching are dedicated to dealing with this issue. I am doing less and less actual teaching, more and more policing. Sometimes I try to remember the last time I actually looked forward to walking into a classroom. It's been a while.

"McDonald's is giving its 43,000 restaurants a technology makeover," reports the Wall Street Journal, including AI-enabled drive-throughs and AI-powered tools for managers — as well as internet-connected kitchen equipment.

"Technology solutions will alleviate the stress...." says McDonald's CIO Brian Rice. McDonald's tapped Google Cloud in late 2023 to bring more computing power to each of its restaurants — giving them the ability to process and analyze data on-site... a faster, cheaper option than sending data to the cloud, especially in more far-flung locations with less reliable cloud connections, said Rice... Edge computing will enable applications like predicting when kitchen equipment — such as fryers and its notorious McFlurry ice cream machines — is likely to break down, Rice said. The burger chain said its suppliers have begun installing sensors on kitchen equipment that will feed data to the edge computing system and give franchisees a "real-time" view into how their restaurants are operating. AI can then analyze that data for early signs of a maintenance problem.

McDonald's is also exploring the use of computer vision, the form of AI behind facial recognition, in store-mounted cameras to determine whether orders are accurate before they're handed to customers, he said. "If we can proactively address those issues before they occur, that's going to mean smoother operations in the future," Rice added...

Additionally, the ability to tap edge computing will power voice AI at the drive-through, a capability McDonald's is also working with Google's cloud-computing arm to explore, Rice said. The company has been experimenting with voice-activated drive-throughs and robotic deep fryers since 2019, and ended its partnership with International Business Machines to test automated order-taking at the drive-through in 2024.

Edge computing will also help McDonald's restaurant managers oversee their in-store operations. The burger giant is looking to create a "generative AI virtual manager," Rice said, which handles administrative tasks such as shift scheduling on managers' behalf. Fast-food giant Yum Brands' Pizza Hut and Taco Bell have explored similar capabilities.

Last week Google urged the U.S. government not to break up the company — but apparently, it didn't work.
In a new filing Friday, America's Justice Department "reiterated its November proposal that Google be forced to sell its Chrome web browser," reports the Washington Post, "to address a federal judge finding the company guilty of being an illegal monopoly in August." The government also kept a proposal that Google be banned from paying other companies to give its search engine preferential placement on their apps and phones. At the same time, the government dropped its demand that Google sell its stakes in AI start-ups after one of the start-ups, Anthropic AI, argued that it needed Google's money to compete in the fast-growing industry.

The government's final proposal "reaffirms that Google must divest the Chrome browser — an important search access point — to provide an opportunity for a new rival to operate a significant gateway to search the internet, free of Google's monopoly control," Justice Department lawyers wrote in the filing... Judge Amit Mehta, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who had ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly, will decide on the final remedies in April.
The article quotes a Google spokesperson's response: that the Justice Department's "sweeping" proposals "continue to go miles beyond the court's decision, and would harm America's consumers, economy and national security."

As Christie's auction house planned the first-ever auction dedicated to AI-generated art works, over 5,600 people signed an online letter urging them to cancel it. "Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license," the letter complained.

"These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them. Your support of these models, and the people who use them, rewards and further incentivizes AI companies' mass theft of human artists' work." CNET reports that the signers "range from illustrators to authors to art therapists to cinematographers, from countries all across the globe."

Christie's ignored them all and held the auction anyways. So what happened when it was over on Wednesday morning? More than 30 lots attracted hundreds of bids and brought in $728,784, Christie's reports. And there's a generational twist: The auction house says 37% of registrants were completely new to Christie's, and 48% of bidders were millennials or members of Gen Z... The highest price in the sale was $277,200 for a work by Refik Anadol titled Machine Hallucinations — ISS Dreams — A. It used a data set of more than 1.2 million images taken from the International Space Station and satellites.
ARTnews reports that the auction actually brought in more than Christie's had expected: The sale, which made up of 34 lots, had an 82 percent sell through rate... While some digital artists, including Beeple, championed the sale, others decried it as emblematic of the ongoing struggle between human artistry and machine-driven innovation. The results, however, suggest that AI art — controversial as it may be — is carving a firm place in the market.

"The early web was fun," Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian posted Wednesday on X.com. "It was weird. It was community-driven. It's time to rebuild that.

"Which is why Kevin Rose and I just bought back Digg."

The amount of that purchase is "undisclosed," reports CNBC: The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian's Seven Seven Six.... The company said in a release that it aims to differentiate itself in the social media market by "focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative...." Rose said in a post on X that he and Ohanian "dreamed up features that weren't even possible with yesterday's tech."
"We're bringing more transparency and community partnership," according to Rose's post, "unlike anything you've seen, plus AI that unlocks creativity without sanitizing the human element. The timing is finally right to reimagine what's possible."

"I really disliked you for a long time," Ohanian tells Rose in their joint announcement video. (To which a cheery Rose responds, "Rightfully so.")

But in the video Ohanian also says that today "Our perspective on the world has shifted a lot. You don't want to live in the past, but now we actually have the technology to make better, healthier community experiences." ("Old Rivals, New Vision," says a post on Digg's X.com account, urging readers to "Sign up to get early access when invites go live.")

And Digg.com now just displays this teasing catchphrase. "The front page of the internet, now with superpowers." (At the top of the page there's also a link to watch Diggnation Live at SXSW.)

While valued at $160 million dollars in 2008, Digg's plummeting traffic led to its brand and web site being acquired in 2012 by tech incubator Betaworks for about $500,000, according to CNBC...

Axiom Space and Red Hat will collaborate to launch Data Center Unit-1 (AxDCU-1) to the International Space Station this spring. It's a small data processing prototype (powered by lightweight, edge-optimized Red Hat Device Edge) that will demonstrate initial Orbital Data Center (ODC) capabilities.

"It all sounds rather grand for something that resembles a glorified shoebox," reports the Register. Axiom Space said: "The prototype will test applications in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning (AI/ML), data fusion and space cybersecurity."

Space is an ideal environment for edge devices. Connectivity to datacenters on Earth is severely constrained, so the more processing that can be done before data is transmitted to a terrestrial receiving station, the better. Tony James, chief architect, Science and Space at Red Hat, said: "Off-planet data processing is the next frontier, and edge computing is a crucial component. With Red Hat Device Edge and in collaboration with Axiom Space, Earth-based mission partners will have the capabilities necessary to make real-time decisions in space with greater reliability and consistency...."

The Red Hat Device Edge software used by Axiom's device combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat Ansible Platform, and MicroShift, a lightweight Kubernetes container orchestration service derived from Red Hat OpenShift. The plan is for Axiom Space to host hybrid cloud applications and cloud-native workloads on-orbit. Jason Aspiotis, global director of in-space data and security, Axiom Space, told The Register that the hardware itself is a commercial off-the-shelf unit designed for operation in harsh environments... "AxDCU-1 will have the ability to be controlled and utilized either via ground-to-space or space-to-space communications links. Our current plans are to maintain this device on the ISS. We plan to utilize this asset for at least two years."
The article notes that HPE has also "sent up a succession of Spaceborne computers — commercial, off-the-shelf supercomputers — over the years to test storage, recovery, and operational potential on long-duration missions." (They apparently use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.) "At the other end of the scale, the European Space Agency has run Raspberry Pi computers on the ISS for years as part of the AstroPi educational outreach program."

Axiom Space says their Orbital Data Center is deigned to "reduce delays traditionally associated with orbital data processing and analysis." By utilizing Earth-independent cloud storage and edge processing infrastructure, Axiom Space ODCs will enable data to be processed closer to its source, spacecraft or satellites, bypassing the need for terrestrial-based data centers. This architecture alleviates reliance on costly, slow, intermittent or contested network connections, creating more secure and quicker decision-making in space.

The goal is to allow Axiom Space and its partners to have access to real-time processing capabilities, laying the foundation for increased reliability and improved space cybersecurity with extensive applications. Use cases for ODCs include but are not limited to supporting Earth observation satellites with in-space and lower latency data storage and processing, AI/ML training on-orbit, multi-factor authentication and cyber intrusion detection and response, supervised autonomy, in-situ space weather analytics and off-planet backup & disaster recovery for critical infrastructure on Earth.

The Open Source Initiative's Board of Directors election "has become embroiled in controversy..." writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at The New Stack.

"The real issue is the community's opposition to the open source AI definition (OSAID), which the organization released last October," he adds — but "the election process has been criticized because the OSI has refused to accept the candidacy of Debian developer Luke Faraone, citing a missed application deadline." Faraone claims they submitted their application around 9 p.m. PST on Feb. 17, while the OSI maintains the deadline was 11:59 p.m. UTC (3:59 p.m. PST) on the same day.

The dispute has raised a firestorm about the clarity of communication regarding deadlines and time zones. Critics argue that the deadline's time zone was not clearly specified on the OSI's public-facing website. Tracy Hinds, chair of OSI, acknowledged this oversight but stated that full members received multiple emails with the correct time zone information. "Everyone who is qualified to run for elections (full members of OSI) received emails with the time zone," wrote Hinds, in an email to The New Stack. "The public-facing web page did not have the time zone, and we've now updated it for clarity going forward.

"Extending the deadline would be unfair to the other candidates...."

On LinkedIn, Bruce Perens, one of the OSI's founders wrote, "Open Source Initiative invents rule at the last minute to deny opposition candidate's nomination for their board election."
There are three board sets up for election in March, the article points out. "Two well-known figures in the open source world — Richard Fontana, Red Hat's principal commercial counsel and a former OSI board member, and [Bradley] Kuhn, policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy — are running on a joint platform of repealing the open source AI definition."

In a blog post Faraone promised a similar platform (also supporting a repeal of the definition) — had their candidacy not been rejected.

Microsoft is reportedly developing its own large language model series capable of rivaling OpenAI and Anthropic's models. SiliconANGLE reports: Sources told Bloomberg that the LLM series is known as MAI. That's presumably an acronym for "Microsoft artificial intelligence." It might also be a reference to Maia 100, an internally-developed AI chip the company debuted last year. It's possible Microsoft is using the processor to power the new MAI models. The company recently tested the LLM series to gauge its performance. As part of the evaluation, Microsoft engineers checked whether MAI could power the company's Copilot family of AI assistants. Data from the tests reportedly indicates that the LLM series is competitive with models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

That Microsoft evaluated whether MAI could be integrated into Copilot hints the LLM series is geared towards general-purpose processing rather than reasoning. Many of the tasks supported by Copilot can be performed with a general-purpose model. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft is currently developing a second LLM series optimized for reasoning tasks. The report didn't specify details such as the number of models Microsoft is training or their parameter counts. It's also unclear whether they might provide multimodal features.

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned at SXSW that agentic AI poses significant privacy and security risks, as these AI agents require extensive access to users' personal data, likely processing it unencrypted in the cloud. TechCrunch reports: "So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don't have to touch it, right?," Whittaker mused. Then she explained the type of access the AI agent would need to perform these tasks, including access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends. "It would need to be able to drive that [process] across our entire system with something that looks like root permission, accessing every single one of those databases -- probably in the clear, because there's no model to do that encrypted," Whittaker warned.

"And if we're talking about a sufficiently powerful ... AI model that's powering that, there's no way that's happening on device," she continued. "That's almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where it's being processed and sent back. So there's a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this hype around agents, and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services [and] muddying their data," Whittaker concluded.

If a messaging app like Signal were to integrate with AI agents, it would undermine the privacy of your messages, she said. The agent has to access the app to text your friends and also pull data back to summarize those texts. Her comments followed remarks she made earlier during the panel on how the AI industry had been built on a surveillance model with mass data collection. She said that the "bigger is better AI paradigm" -- meaning the more data, the better -- had potential consequences that she didn't think were good. With agentic AI, Whittaker warned we'd further undermine privacy and security in the name of a "magic genie bot that's going to take care of the exigencies of life," she concluded. You can watch the full speech on YouTube.

Apple is postponing the rollout of its more personalized Siri features, originally promised as part of its Apple Intelligence initiative. "It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year," Apple told DaringFireball. The future update seeks to give Siri greater awareness of personal context and the ability to perform actions across apps.

The White House is weighing measures to restrict Chinese artificial-intelligence upstart DeepSeek, including banning its chatbot from government devices because of national-security concerns, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: U.S. officials are worried about DeepSeek's handling of user data, which the Chinese company says it stores in servers located in China, the people said. Officials also believe DeepSeek hasn't sufficiently explained how it uses the data it collects and who has access to the data, they said.

The Trump administration is likely to adopt a rule that would bar people from downloading DeepSeek's chatbot app onto U.S. government devices, the people said. Officials are also considering two other possible moves: banning the DeepSeek app from U.S. app stores and putting limits on how U.S.-based cloud service providers could offer DeepSeek's AI models to their customers, people close to the matter said. They cautioned that discussions about these two moves were still at an early stage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web -- not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which has also exited beta. DuckDuckGo first launched AI-assisted answers -- originally called DuckAssist -- in 2023. The feature is billed as a less obnoxious version of tools like Google's AI Overviews, designed to offer more concise responses and let you adjust how often you see them, including turning the responses off entirely. If you have DuckDuckGo's AI-generated answers set to "often," you'll still only see them around 20 percent of the time, though the company plans on increasing the frequency eventually.

Some of DuckDuckGo's AI-assisted answers bring up a box for follow-up questions, redirecting you to a conversation with its Duck.ai chatbot. As is the case with its AI-assisted answers, you don't need an account to use Duck.ai, and it comes with the same emphasis on privacy. It lets you toggle between GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, Llama 3.3, Mistral Small 3, and Claude 3 Haiku, with the advantage being that you can interact with each model anonymously by hiding your IP address. DuckDuckGo also has agreements with the AI company behind each model to ensure your data isn't used for training.

Duck.ai also rolled out a feature called Recent Chats, which stores your previous conversations locally on your device rather than on DuckDuckGo's servers. Though Duck.ai is also leaving beta, that doesn't mean the flow of new features will stop. In the next few weeks, Duck.ai will add support for web search, which should enhance its ability to respond to questions. The company is also working on adding voice interaction on iPhone and Android, along with the ability to upload images and ask questions about them. ... [W]hile Duck.ai will always remain free, the company is considering including access to more advanced AI models with its $9.99 per month subscription.