Episode Details

In this episode, Cristina (Chief Marketing Officer) and Kamyl (Chief Comms & Public Affairs Officer) discuss the AI announcements of Google I/O, our response, and how our long-term stance on AI optionality led to rapid and record growth.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

If you have feedback on Duck Tales, or episode ideas, email us at podcast@duckduckgo.com

Cristina: Hi, and welcome to Duck Tales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. We’ve been running Duck Tales for over six months now and have a strong and engaged following on Substack, especially. We’d love to get your feedback. What do you like or dislike about Duck Tales? What topics would you like to hear more about? Is there anything you’d like us to go deeper on? You can write to us at podcast at duckduckgo.com. That’s podcast at duckduckgo.com with suggestions. We will read all of them. And you can find our email in the show notes too. So with that said, hi, I’m Cristina. I’m on the marketing team. And today I’m here with Kamyl, who leads our communications and public affairs teams. And we’re gonna interview each other today. Kamyl, do you wanna say hi or anything else?

Kamyl: Ha ha. Greetings everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Cristina, I’m really excited to talk about our topic today with you.

Cristina: Awesome. Okay, so to jump in, DuckDuckGo has always been known for privacy, but lately we’ve been talking a lot about AI choice. How did private, useful, and optional become the lens we put on AI?

Kamyl: So I remember when ChatGPT first launched and I was talking to Gabriel a little bit about, you know, how do we think this is going to show up in DuckDuckGo? And I think one of the things that makes working here at DuckDuckGo really fun and different is that we get the freedom to think a little differently, and to say if everyone is doing one thing, how can we do it a little different. How can we think about AI in a way that’s uniquely DuckDuckGo? And that’s how we landed on private, useful, and optional. Private, what most people know about DuckDuckGo, we’ve always respected our users’ privacy, never collect search histories, anything like that. And we do the same with AI. Useful in that we never wanted to just launch an AI feature. Because it’s AI, but it actually had to do something helpful. It had to do something to improve the search experience or the browsing experience. And then optional, knowing that there are many people out there with many different opinions about AI, and opinions are still forming. Some people want the ability to use it to the their most its most extent. And some people don’t want to see it at all. And that, you know, because of a lot of big tech investments in a in a in AI like Google, they aren’t willing to necessarily just give AI a straight up off button. So we knew that those were things that we could do uniquely, put them together and then that became our lens.

Cristina: So because we are in this optional standpoint, we offer a no AI experien