It's like the old proverb says: fuck your AI.

Sadly, the only useful thing "AI" does really well is search. I don't use AI white for anything anymore besides for getting much, much better results for search queries.

Skill issue

I mean, I don't hate this application of llms. It's not usually great, but if you only want something simple, it's often as good, and faster, than digging through a couple of sites that are also (way too often) ai generated in the first place to find one good one.

The problem isn't the ai search, is the giant shitpond of ai generated articles and sites that fuck up searching in the first place.

I think you mean answering questions, not search. Search would be giving you links or quotes from existing documents and nothing more. With time AI is going to get a lot better at everything. And it will become less wasteful so the environmentalist reasons not to use it will fade. The only thing that can keep people from using it indefinitely is understanding its devastating consequences for society and human existence.

That is, to my understanding, not at all what is happening. LLMs are mainly getting better because they're being fed with more data and having more layers. This directly makes their environmental impact worse. They will also reach computational limits, hopefully sooner rather than later. So there is currently not much indication that generalist AI will keep getting better, nor that it will become less wasteful. Purpose built smaller models could be both, but they'd far more closely resemble any other software tool than LLMs, both in use and social impact.

This is confirmation bias though. Most people using DuckDuckGo are people who care about their privacy and don't want to search the web using Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Which are all sprinting into the AI search industry. There's a direct link between people who use DuckDuckGo and being anti-AI.

AI got a lot better in recent years because of transformers and the multi-head attention mechanism. Some more major breakthroughs will be made with a bit more time that will greatly boost accuracy and efficiency. Technology progresses exponentially so advances will get more and more common. One example of how LLMs are currently getting more efficient is DeepSeek's improvement of sparse attention. There are trillions of dollars being thrown at these problems and they're racing as fast as they can because there's an arms race as well as heavy market competition.

Whether or not a search engine uses AI doesn't necessarily say anything about its privacy. DDG already processes your queries and passing the query through an AI doesn't affect your privacy as long as the AI model is not affected in any way and the query isn't kept for future AI purposes. But you're right there's generally a negative correlation between AI and privacy and also a positive correlation between people who care about privacy and people who don't like AI, so there's probably a correlation between DDG users and anti-AI people. However I think you meant to say "selection bias".

What I'm saying is, the two interests are very heavily linked. Right of privacy people and anti AI people have massive overlap. DuckDuckGo users and anti AI people are also massively overlapped.

Yes I think you're right