Privacy-focused search engine Brave announced Wednesday that it is revamping its answer engine to return synthetic answers using AI. This new feature is available to users worldwide.
The new 'AI Answers' feature provides nicely formatted answers to questions like 'Who walked on the moon?', 'A list of all the actors who played Batman' and 'How to scale down a Nespresso pixie.' returns the answer. For example, you can summarize restaurant reviews and salient points.
Image credit: Brave
The company launched an AI-powered summary function in March 2023. The company said its new AI-powered search is a significant upgrade from that.
Brave said informational queries, such as those listed for the new answer engine, leverage AI to automatically present information in a summary format. For other queries, users can manually trigger her AI search.
Image credit: Brave
The company last year switched to using its own index for search queries, but says its “Answer with AI” feature uses a combination of large-scale language models (LLM) and reliable data. Stated. Brave said it combines Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 7B as primary models and uses custom transformer models for semantic matching and response.
“Users simply enter a query, just like they are used to with regular search engines. The query is then used to prompt data from the search results using the popular RAG (Search Enhancement Generation). internally into LLM prompts,” Josep Pujol, the company's head of search, told TechCrunch via email.
Image credit: Brave
Multiple reports indicate that AI-powered search could have a significant impact on the future of the web. Brave, which processes more than 10 billion queries a year, says that while users are demanding AI-enhanced answers and new ways to consume content, this approach is detrimental to publishers who publish content on the web. The company said it is aware of the possibility.
“This challenge is not unique to Brave Search and exists with most AI-powered answer engines and chatbots, whether premium or open. Brave, as both a browser and a search engine, “We are aware of the challenges. Therefore, we plan to monitor and quantify the impact of AI-generated content on site visits and ultimately address any disruption that may be caused by reduced traffic,” the company said. Stated.
Other search engines such as Google and Bing are also adopting AI-powered answers through various experiments. Meanwhile, startups like Perplexity and You.com are competing to become users' answer engines of choice.