Privacy-focused search engine Brave announced Wednesday that it is enhancing its answer engine to deliver AI-powered synthesized answers. This new feature, known as “Answer with AI,” is now accessible to users worldwide.
The “Answer with AI” feature provides neatly formatted answers to queries such as “People who walked on the moon,” “List of all actors who played Batman,” or “How to descale Nespresso Pixie.” It can also summarize reviews and key points about a restaurant, among other things.
The company initially launched an AI-powered summarization feature in March 2023. This latest AI-powered search upgrade is a significant improvement over the previous version.
Brave stated that for informational queries, the new answer engine will automatically utilize AI to present information in a concise format. Users can also manually trigger an AI search for other types of queries.
Brave switched to using its own index for search queries last year. The “Answer with AI” feature incorporates a mix of large language models (LLMs) and reliable data, including Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B as primary models alongside custom transformer models for semantic matching and answering.
The company’s head of search, Josep Pujol, explained, “The user simply needs to enter a query as they would with a regular search engine. The query is internally converted to an LLM prompt using data from search results as context, with typical RAG (retrieval augmented generation).”
Brave has acknowledged the potential impact of AI-generated content on publishers. While users are seeking AI-augmented answers and new ways to consume content, the company is monitoring and quantifying the effects on site visits to address any disruptions that may occur due to a drop in traffic.
Google and Bing have also experimented with AI-powered answers, and startups like Perplexity and You.com are striving to become the preferred answer engine for users.
