Brave Search Unveils ‘Answer With AI’ Functionality: What Users Need to Know

Brave Search has received a new AI update that helps users find answers to the questions they want while browsing online. According to the company’s blog post, search engines now “synthesize information from multiple sources into a single, comprehensible answer to almost any question.” The new ‘Answer with AI’ feature answers your questions like “people who walked on the moon” and “list of directors of Batman movies” in a clean and simply structured way. According to Brave, it can also help summarize reviews and highlight specific features of certain sites, such as restaurants.

It provides near-instant responses referencing sources alongside regular search results, works regardless of browser or platform and appears to be an update to the search engine’s ‘Summary’ function from last year. While ‘Answer with AI’ will automatically summarize search results, it can also be manually triggered for searches that do not fall within Brave’s predefined search parameters. According to Brave, the new functionality employs a combination of large language models (LLMs), with the Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B serving as core models in addition to custom large language models.

“The user only needs to enter a query as they are used to doing with a regular search engine. According to TechCrunch, Josep Pujol, head of search at Brave, said the query will then be internally converted to an LLM prompt using data from the search results as a reference with a generic RAG (retrieval augmented generation). Some research in recent months has shown that AI-powered search could have a negative impact on the internet. While Brave claims to use AI to provide solutions, the company is aware that this method can harm publishers who produce high-quality content. Other popular search engines like Google and Bing have also implemented AI-powered answers, with Google’s Search Generative Experience available as an experimental feature in Google Labs. However, organizations like Perplexity and You.com seem to be leveraging artificial intelligence as an alternative to traditional search queries.