Privacy-focused search engine Brave announced Wednesday that it is revamping its answer engine to return synthetic answers powered by artificial intelligence. The new feature is available to users worldwide.
The new AI Answer feature returns well-formed answers to questions like ‘Men who walked on the moon’, ‘List of all the actors who played Batman’ or ‘How to remove Nespresso pixie salts’. It can also summarize reviews and highlights of a restaurant, for example.
Image Credits: Brave
The company launched an AI-powered summary feature in March 2023. The startup said its new AI-powered search is a big upgrade to that.
Brave said that informative queries, like the one reported for the new answer engine, will automatically rely on artificial intelligence to present information in a concise form. For other queries, users can trigger an AI search manually.
Image Credits: Brave
The company, which switched to using its own index for search queries last year, said its “AI Answer” feature uses a combination of large language models (LLM) and trusted data. Brave said it uses a combination of Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B as the main models along with custom transformer models for semantic matching and answering.
“The user only needs to enter a query, as they would with a normal search engine. The query will then be internally converted into an LLM prompt using the data from the search results as context to the prompt, with standard RAG (retrieval augmented generation),” the company’s head of search, Josep Pujol, told TechCrunch via email.
Image Credits: Brave
Multiple References I have pointed out that AI-powered search could have serious implications for the future of the web. Brave, which serves more than 10 billion queries a year, said that while users are demanding AI-augmented answers and new methods of consuming content, the company knows that this approach can be detrimental to publishers who publish content on the web.
“This challenge is not unique to Brave Search, but exists in most AI-powered answer engines and chatbots, premium or open. Brave, both as a browser and a search engine, is aware of these challenges. Accordingly, we will monitor and quantify the impact of AI-generated content on site visits and ultimately address disruptions that a drop in traffic could cause,” the company said.
Other search engines like Google and Bing have also adopted AI-based answers through different experiments. Meanwhile, startups like Perplexity and You.com are also vying to be the answer engine of choice for users.
