TL;DR
- Brave has announced it is rolling out an AI chatbot for its browser.
- The main benefit Brave’s chatbot will have over competitors is its focus on privacy.
- There will be a free and premium version that users can choose from.
With the likes of Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard, and more, there are more than enough AI chatbots to pick from. As if that list wasn’t already overcrowded, Brave is adding to it by unleashing its own in-browser chatbot called Leo.
Brave, the browser known best for its focus on privacy, has announced it is rolling out a browser-native AI chatbot for all desktop users running version 1.60 of the browser. Although Leo is rolling today, some will have to wait as the company will be launching it in phases over the next few days.
Leo was initially launched for testing and feedback in the Nightly channel in late August. The company said it planned on making Leo available to all users in the coming months.
Although the chatbot is only available to desktop users, at the moment, mobile users aren’t being left behind. Brave states that Leo will be available on Android and iOS in the coming months.
When it comes to capabilities, Leo will be similar to what you get from its main competitors. You’ll be able to translate, answer questions, summarize web pages, and generate new content. Leo’s standout feature, however, will be privacy. The company claims that “requests are proxied through an anonymized server,” there’s no need to create an account, and responses are discarded after they are generated.
There will be two versions of Leo to choose from: the free version and Leo Premium. The free version is the default and it uses Meta’s Llama 2 large language model (LLM). Leo Premium, on the other hand, uses Anthropic’s Claude Instant and will cost $15 per month. Brave says that it will make additional models available for Leo Premium, as well as granting users higher rate limits, higher-quality conversations, priority queuing, and access to early access features.
It remains to be seen if privacy will be a big enough selling point to get people to migrate over from ChatGPT or Bing Chat. There’s also the question of whether Brave will have the resources to train Llama 2 to compete with the bigger players.
