Brave launches AI summarizer to bolster search results

March 15, 2023 - TuxCare PR Team

Brave Search now includes Summarizer, an AI-powered tool that provides a summarized answer to an inputted question before the rest of the search results.

It responds to the user’s input with concise and to-the-point answers at the top of Brave Search results pages, based solely on Web search results. We trained our large language models (LLMs) to process multiple sources of information available on the Web, as opposed to a purely generative AI model, which is prone to making unsubstantiated claims. This results in a more concise, accurate, and coherent response. The company stated that its LLM is trained to combat “unsubstantiated assertions,” referring to AI chatter from other search engines such as Bing going awry and sprouting misinformation due to prompt engineering.

Furthermore, the provenance of original data sources is always cited via links. This preserves information attribution and assists users in assessing the trustworthiness of sources, both of which are required to mitigate the authority biases of large language models.

The summary feature is available to all Brave Search users on desktop and mobile, and can be accessed via any browser. According to the company’s examples, it can summarize results for queries such as “are acetaminophen and ibuprofen the same” via medical resources or “what happened in East Palestine Ohio” via news links.

Furthermore, the tool includes references for the data sources used to generate an answer, allowing users to assess the reliability of the summary. Besides that, using recent web results to generate the summary ensures that the tool provides up-to-date data, including updates as needed. In addition to the summary at the top of the search results, the tool will replace the standard result excerpts with a summarized version that should better highlight the answer to the user’s query.

“With 22 million queries per day, Brave Search is the fastest-growing search engine since Bing. Unlike AI chat tools which can provide fabricated responses, the Summarizer generates a plain-written summary at the top of the search results page, aggregating the latest sources on the Web and providing source attribution for transparency and accountability. This open system is available to all Brave Search users today to help them better navigate search results,” said Josep M. Pujol, chief of Search at Brave.

In its announcement, Brave warns users not to trust everything produced by AI-powered search results. It also stated that it does not rely on third parties and does not restrict access due to scalability concerns. The Brave Summarizer is based on in-house models that have been fine-tuned to be as efficient as possible at inference time.

The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.

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