The privacy-focused search engine, Brave, announced a change made to the answer engine, through which it will provide AI-powered synthesized answers. The new change was rolled out to all users worldwide.

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 to descale Nespresso pixie." It can also summarize reviews and salient points of a restaurant, for example.
The company also released an AI summarization feature in March 2023. According to the startup, its new AI-powered search is quite an upgrade of that.

Brave noted that informational questions, like the sample question below for this new answer engine, default into relying on AI to return information summarized. Other queries can be individually prompted with an AI search.

The company, which switched over to using its own index for search queries last year, said its "Answer with AI" feature employs a mix of LLMs and reliable data. According to Brave, the company employs a mix of Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral 7B as major models in addition to custom transformer models for semantic matching and answering.

"The user simply needs to input a query as they would any other with a standard search engine. That query will then be internally translated to a suitable LLM prompt using the data of the search result as contextual background to the prompt, and typical RAG, or retrieval augmented generation.

Many reports indicated that AI-enhanced search might have devastating effects on the future of the web. Brave, which handles more than 10 billion queries yearly, stated users are demanding AI-augmented answers and new ways of consuming content, but the company is aware such an approach could be detrimental to publishers putting out content on the web.

The challenge is not unique to Brave Search but is prevalent across most AI-powered answer engines and chatbots, premium or open. Brave, as a browser and also a search engine, is well aware of these challenges. We will thus monitor and quantify the impact of AI-generated content on visits to sites and eventually address the disruptions that the drop in traffic may cause, the company said.

Other search engines, including Google and Bing, also launched AI-driven answers through different experiments. Furthermore, some startups like Perplexity and You.com are also battling for the same option of the answer engine for users.