On Wednesday, privacy-focused search engine Brave revealed its plans to overhaul its answer engine and provide users with AI-powered synthesized answers. This upgraded feature is now available to users worldwide.
“Answer with AI” returns neatly formatted responses to various questions, including “People who walked on the moon,” “List of all actors who played Batman,” and “How do descale Nespresso pixie?”. It can also efficiently summarize reviews and key information about a restaurant.
In March 2023, the startup first introduced its AI-powered summarization feature. This recent update is a significant improvement to that technology.
Brave confirmed that informational queries, such as those listed above, will automatically utilize AI to present results in a condensed format. However, for other inquiries, users can trigger an AI search manually.
Last year, the company switched to using its own search index. This “Answer with AI” feature combines large language models (LLMs) and reliable data, including Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B as primary models, as well as custom transformer models for semantic matching and answering.
Josep Pujol, Brave’s head of search, shared with TechCrunch via email, “The user simply needs to enter their query as they would with a regular search engine. The query is then internally converted to an LLM prompt, using data from search results as context for the prompt, using a typical RAG (retrieval augmented generation) approach.”
Many have raised concerns about the potential impact of AI-powered search on the future of the internet. As Brave receives over 10 billion queries a year, the company acknowledges that while users demand AI-augmented answers and new ways of consuming content, this approach may have detrimental effects on publishers creating content for the web.
Brave stated, “This challenge is not unique to Brave Search but is present across most AI-powered answer engines and chatbots, whether they are premium or open. As both a browser and search engine, Brave is well aware of these challenges. Therefore, we will be monitoring and quantifying the impact of AI-generated content on site visits and addressing any disruptions in traffic that may arise.”
In addition to Brave, other search engines like Google and Bing have also experimented with AI-powered answers. Startups like Perplexity and You.com are also competing to become the preferred answer engine for users. The future of search continues to evolve, and only time will tell which approach will take the lead.
