the website is just a search engine. Doesn't explain what it does differently.
The name is "Bong" which I assume is a play on an unrelated search engine Bing. What does DDG have to do with this other than some shared search engine results?
It's a play on bang, not bing. DuckDuckGo popularized searches with a bang ("!"), so that from the DDG page you could do a search on Wikipedia for example, without navigating to Wikipedia first and searching there. Other search engines use it too, like Kagi for example.
It's hard to overstate how out of date this opinion is now. I thought I would add some additional sources besides just the openAI article just to give you some idea of the scale of the impact. There are thousands of articles, blogs and other sources discussing the topic.
Also many of my calculations in my life have been quite false as well. I like to remember the problems I did solve. Instead of focusing on the few I couldn't solve.
It is funny how quickly opinions on this topic expire. It almost feels like witnessing an XKCD 1/10000 moment.
Apropos failing at calculating, I have a relevant anecdote that I can't help but wanting to share. A few years ago (2020) I got inadvertently handed a math problem I had to solve, and failed spectacularly at. I suck at math, had no one around me that didn't also suck, and the problem wasn't Googlable. The issue was creating a staff rotation for medical interns in a rural hospital, in an exceptional 6 month period where the previous symmetrical split of four interns to medicine and four to surgery was disrupted by an extra intern. Interns were on call for both departments on nightshifts and weekends, and since they all needed the same amount of total "on call" hours during a 6 month period, same amount of regular hours, and there were a number of legal and logistical constraints to how working hours could be distributed, the asymmetry turned out to be a real headache. Previously, getting the responsibility for setting up the next rotation was a coveted power amongst medical interns, as it just involved copy pasting new names into a rotational plan established decades ago by some forgotten elder, where you could abuse your privilege to slot yourself into the juiciest holiday periods. So no one realized they were handing over a logic bomb that would overload the atrophied math circuits of some poor schmuck fresh out of med school (me). Anyways I spent days Googling, setting up excel formulas, calling more mathematically qualified friends (who also failed), before finally giving up and spending 20 hours manually setting up a deeply flawed plan that ended up pissing numerous people off.
The other day, just for fun, I dug up my old emails with the original excel sheets and handed the problem over to Opus 5.5. It ran a quick python script that solved the problem in literally 3 seconds, and then seemingly just for fun ran a python solver that nuked my CPU for 10 minutes to find the proven optimal staff rotation. Then it sent me a winkyface emoji after pointing out the funny coincidence that me and my buddy (who was on the email chain) just happened to get Christmas and New years off.
People are tired of the low quality AI generated nonsense that has flooded everything.
This tech is a certified failure and needs to be regulated out of existence (or pigeonholed into very specific niche use cases). The election confirms this.
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