Privacy-focused web browser Brave has announced an AI-powered summary that helps users who enter search queries find short and concise answers to their questions.
In a company filing Thursday, Brave said it trained its models to process information from more than one web source, and that its summaries came with links to the original information for users to verify.
All Brave Search users have access to the summary, he said. The company continues to work on expanding the service.
Brave also noted that its models located the answers to search queries, placed them in search result snippets, and even highlighted some of them to make it easier for users.
Typing in “what happened in Turkey” brought up a summary that highlighted that the country had been hit by “multiple earthquakes in recent months” and offered details about some of those earthquakes. The answer was attributed to The New York Times. However, the summary did not fully capture the mass destruction and loss of life.
Photo of a sample search query on Brave with the summarization feature | Photo credit: Via Brave
“Unlike many others who have recently released similar features, we do not rely on third parties or restrict access due to scalability concerns. Brave Summarizer relies on our owned and operated models that are highly tuned to be as efficient as possible at inference time,” the company said in its post, emphasizing that its Summarizer does not power ChatGPT.
But Brave warned that its early-stage model is still prone to hallucinations — a phenomenon where users can experience confusing results that may be unexpected, inaccurate or even offensive.
Brave pointed out that while summaries are generated for about 17% of queries, its systems were still more open to users than those of Bing or Google.