Brave Search is adopting AI to answer your queries

Privacy-focused search engine Brave announced Wednesday that it is revamping its answer engine to return AI-powered synthesized answers. The new feature is available to users across the globe.

The new “Answer with AI” feature returns neatly formatted answers for questions like “People who walked on the moon,” “List of all actors who played Batman” or “How do descale Nespresso pixie.” It can also summarize reviews and salient points of a restaurant, for example.

The company launched an AI-powered summarization feature in March 2023. The startup said that its new AI-powered search is a big upgrade of that.

Brave said that informational queries, such as the one listed about the new answer engine, will automatically rely on AI to present information in a summarized format. For other queries, users can trigger an AI search manually.

The company, which switched to using its own index for search queries last year, said that its “Answer with AI” feature uses a combination of large language models (LLMs) and reliable data. Brave said it uses a combination of Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B as primary models along with custom transformer models for semantic matching and answering.

“The user only needs to enter a query as they are used to doing with a regular search engine. The query will then be internally converted to an LLM prompt using the data from search results as context to the prompt, with typical RAG (retrieval augmented generation),” the company’s head of search, Josep Pujol, told TechCrunch via email.

Multiple reports have pointed out that AI-powered search could have grave effects on the future of the web. Brave, which severs over 10 billion queries a year, said that while users are demanding AI-augmented answers and new methods of content consumption, the company is aware that this approach might detrimental to publishers putting out content on the web.

“This challenge is not unique to Brave Search but present across most AI-powered answer engines and chatbots, premium or open. Brave, as both a browser and search engine, is aware of these challenges. Consequently, we will be monitoring and quantifying the impact of AI-generated content on site visits, and eventually will address the disruptions that the drop in traffic could cause,” the company said.

Other search engines, such as Google and Bing, have also adopted AI-powered answers through different experiments. Meanwhile, startups like Perplexity and You.com are also vying to be the answer engine of choice for users.