DuckDuckGo Unveils a Feature that Summarizes Information Using Generative AI

The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo entered the generative technology race by announcing a free AI-powered summarization feature, an instant answer but not a chatbot, called DuckAssist this week. DuckAssist — in beta now and only available via apps and browser extensions — suggests natural language answers in English when it recognizes a search engine it can answer. And when an AI-powered response is available, the user sees a magic wand icon with an "ask me" button in their search results. "If this DuckAssist trial goes well, we will roll it out to all DuckDuckGo search users in the coming weeks," said Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, in a blog post. DuckDuckGo says it’s drawing on natural language technology from Davinci model from OpenAI and Claude model from Anthropic, combined with its own indexing of Wikipedia — "99%+ is Wikipedia" — and occasionally related sites like the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other sources. The company also notes DDG is “experimenting” with the new Turbo model OpenAI recently announced. Although it’s imperfect, DuckDuckGo considers Wikipedia a relatively reliable source. Moreover, Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, said: "Generative AI technology is designed to generate text in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it “knows” the answer or not. By asking DuckAssist to only summarize information from Wikipedia and related sources, the probability that it will “hallucinate” — that is, just make something up — is greatly diminished." "In all cases though, a source link, usually a Wikipedia article, will be linked below the summary, often pointing you to a specific section within that article so you can learn more." "Nonetheless, DuckAssist won’t generate accurate answers all of the time." "DuckAssist may also make mistakes when answering especially complex questions, simply because it would be difficult for any tool to summarize answers in those instances."  

Snapchat Introduces My AI, a ChatGPT-Powered Artificial Intelligence Bot Into Its App

GitHub Copilot, Which Suggests Code in Real-Time through Generative AI, Launches Its Business Offer

Opera Will Release a New Browser with Built-In Access to ChatGPT and Other AI Services

Google Announces 'Bard', a Testing, ChatGPT-Style AI Service

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced in a blog post yesterday the launch of its experimental conversational AI service, Bard, powered by LaMDA Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Bard will be available to "trusted testers" before being made more widely available to the public in the coming weeks and will compete directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Bard will have a search desktop design that can be used in a question-and-answer format. In the last months, Google has accelerated its developments as part of a “code red” plan to respond to ChatGPT. Features of the chatbot Bard will include a search desktop design that could be used in a question-and-answer format, as shown in the image below released by Google's CEO. "Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses," Sundar Pichai wrote. "We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information," he added. Sundar Pichai said that this rival of ChatGPT is a "lightweight model version of LaMDA," and "enables us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback." "Our newest AI technologies — like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen, and MusicLM — are creating entirely new ways to engage with information, from language and images to video and audio. We’re working to bring these latest AI advancements into our products, starting with Search." In addition, Google is scaling its AI efforts through Google Cloud partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai, and Anthropic, which was just announced last week. Google’s AI chief, Jeff Dean, told recently that the company has much more "reputational risk" in providing wrong information and thus was moving "more conservatively than a small startup."     1/ In 2021, we shared next-gen language + conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Coming soon: Bard, a new experimental conversational #GoogleAI service powered by LaMDA. https://t.co/cYo6iYdmQ1 — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023 As people turn to Google for insights esp questions where there’s no one right answer, new AI-powered features in Search will distill complex info so they can quickly understand the big picture then explore further and learn more from the web. (3/4) pic.twitter.com/fsK2SljnlV — Prabhakar Raghavan (@WittedNote) February 6, 2023

ChatGPT and Upcoming AI Bots Will Make Jobs Obsolete in Several Industries

The surprisingly intelligent bot ChatGPT — released to the public as a free tool by a Microsoft-backed research laboratory in November 2021 — and other upcoming AI systems can leave many well-paid workers vulnerable, making many jobs obsolete in industries such as finance, health care, higher-ed, graphic design, software, and publishing. These are some sectors at risk of being supplemented by AI, according to several experts quoted by The New York Post. Education ChatGPT — currently banned in NYC schools — would work well at the middle or high school level. In higher education, AI could teach without oversight. At the Ph.D. level, AI would struggle, for now, to create an independent thesis on an area not studied yet. Finance Wall Street could see many jobs axed in coming years, especially in the trading and investment bank sides. Currently, many people are hired out of college and spend two, or three years to work doing Excel modeling, a job that AI does much faster. Software Engineering Website designers and engineers responsible for simple coding are at risk of being made obsolete within a few years since AI can draft the software hand-tailored to a user’s requests and parameters. Journalism AI technology is already highly qualified for copy editing, including summarizing, making an article concise, and composing headlines. For now, the tool is showing a complete inability to fact-check efficiently and write a story with proper citations. Graphic Design OpenAI‘s DALL-E, which can generate tailored images from user-generated prompts, along with Craiyon, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, pose a threat to many in the graphic and creative design industries. Copyright issues are also being generated by image-based AI. Getty Images recently announced legal action against Stability AI — Stable Diffusion’s parent company — claiming that the program “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright.” Update: A recent article in Forbes, said, "Professions that will be disrupted by generative AI include marketing, copywriting, illustration and design, sales, customer support, software coding, video editing, film-making, 3D modeling, architecture, engineering, gaming, music production, legal contracts, and even scientific research." "Software applications will soon emerge that will make it easy and intuitive for anyone to use generative AI for those fields and more." "Other industries ripe for disruption by generative AI may not immediately seem obvious. It may be used in the finance sector to make recommendations and manage risk. It can help the healthcare sector with diagnoses and predictive medicine. The advertising industry can use generative AI not only for creative work, but also in customer targeting. Biopharma can use generative AI to search medical literature, finding novel ways of using existing medicines off-label, and discovering new compounds to treat disease." "Without hyperbole, this may be a technology inflection point like the world has never seen before." "Tectonic as these changes are, you should expect to see massive disruption in 2023, 2024, and 2025. This is happening now." • Insider: From financial planning to dealmaking, here's how ChatGPT could impact jobs across Wall Street

Over 1 Million People Signed Up for the Bing Waitlist; Microsoft Shows Viva Sales Emails

"ChatGPT is High Tech Plagiarism; It Undermines Education," Says Noam Chomsky

Microsoft Presented Its New Bing Search, Powered by ChatGPT

Top Contenders Challenge ChatGPT. Google Invests $300M In Anthropic

IBL News | New York Nine weeks after ChatGPT was launched, the company behind it, OpenAI, released this week a brief technical note stating, "we've upgraded the ChatGPT model with improved factuality and mathematical capabilities." ChatGPT took the world by storm and made AI the next big thing, according to experts. Since then, tech giants like Google are in "red code," and every day seems to bring new contenders. At least four top players are working on “generative” A.I., technologies making moves to challenge ChatGPT: Google: LaMDA. Launched in 2021, Google said in a launch blog post that LaMDA’s conversational skills "have been years in the making." Like ChatGPT, LaMDA is trained in dialogue. It's built on Transformer, the neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017. The Transformer architecture "produces a model that can be trained to read many words (a sentence or paragraph, for example), pay attention to how those words relate to one another, and then predict what words it thinks will come next." Anthropic: Claude. Founded in 2021 by a group of people that included several researchers who left OpenAI, this San Francisco AI start-up has raised $300 million in new funding, in exchange of taking a stake of 10%. The deal values Anthropic at $3 billion. According to a report posted at The Financial Times today, Google has already made that investment. The British paper said that Google confirmed it had made that investment and that it had a large cloud contract with Anthropic to use the Google Cloud infrastructure, but did not provide further details. This deal would echo OpenAI’s agreement with Microsoft’s Azure. Anthropic developed an AI chatbot, Claude — available in closed beta through a Slack integration — that reports say is similar to ChatGPT and has even demonstrated improvements. Character AI. This news AI chatbot technology allows users to chat and role-play with anyone, living or dead — as it can impersonate historical figures like Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare. It was launched by two engineers that left Google in October 2022, Noam Shazeer, one of the authors of the original Transformer paper, and Daniel De Freitas. Now they are trying to raise $250 million in new funding, a striking price for a startup with a product still in beta. DeepMind: Sparrow. DeepMind, the British-owned subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, introduced Sparrow in a paper in September. For now, Sparrow is a research-based, proof-of-concept model that is not ready to be deployed, according to Geoffrey Irving, a safety researcher at DeepMind and lead author of the paper introducing Sparrow. DeepMind’s CEO and cofounder Demis Hassabis said in a TIME article two weeks ago that its company is considering releasing its chatbot Sparrow in a “private beta” sometime in 2023. DeepMind says "Sparrow is a dialogue agent that’s useful and reduces the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers." The agent is designed to "talk with a user, answer questions and search the internet using Google when it’s helpful to look up evidence to inform its responses." It was hailed as an important step toward creating safer, less-biased machine learning (ML) systems, thanks to its application of reinforcement learning based on input from human research participants for training. Axios: How ChatGPT became the next big thing Everything that happened in AI this January. Ready for February? pic.twitter.com/dWwuIYmXB7 — Lior⚡ (@AlphaSignalAI) February 2, 2023 Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money. Even if they catch up on AI, they can't fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business! https://t.co/jtq25LXdkj — Paul Buchheit (@paultoo) December 1, 2022

ChatGPT Surpasses 100 Million Users in January, with 13 Million Daily Visitors

ChatGPT is on track to exceed 100 million monthly active users, increasing from 57 million in December, according to UBS analyst Lloyd Walmsley. Currently, the natural language chatbot ChatGPT receives 13 million daily visitors, more than double the figure from December 2022, the analyst notes. The New York Times quotes other sources stating that ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly five million visits a day. In a research note, Walmsley points out that it took TikTok nine months from its launch to reach 100 million users, while it took Instagram 2.5 years. "We have not seen an app grow at this rate before," the analyst adds. Developed by start-up OpenAI and backed by Microsoft, ChatGPT has experienced explosive growth. Venture capital investors speculate that the market for generative AI applications could be worth up to $1 trillion. On the other hand, Microsoft continues to integrate ChatGPT capabilities into its Office products. Microsoft Team is the latest one, as shown below.   Big News 🚨 Microsoft just launched Teams premium powered by ChatGPT at just $7/month 🤯 With ChatGPT, Teams users can generate automatic meeting notes, AI-recommended tasks, personalized meeting templates, and a lot more!! pic.twitter.com/fbzmUc7h8Q — Shubham Saboo (@Saboo_Shubham_) February 2, 2023

......

Today's Summary

Saturday, November 22, 2025

Education technology today is marked by rising AI adoption among educators and innovative personalized learning approaches.

Video News

Loading videos...

Today in AI & EdTech

Saturday, November 22, 2025

AI is transforming the education technology landscape as more teachers adopt intelligent tools, driving forward and adaptive learning experiences.

AI & EdTech Videos

OpenAI Launches Educational GPT Model

Adaptive Learning Platforms Show 40% Improvement

Microsoft Education Copilot Beta Launch

Today in Education

U.S. Department of Education Announces New Funding for STEM Programs

The initiative aims to support science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Global Education Summit Highlights Digital Learning Innovations

Leaders from around the world discuss the future of remote and hybrid learning models.

New Study Shows Benefits of Early Childhood Education

Research indicates significant long-term academic and social advantages for students.