Brave — a multi-platform web browser that built its user base on privacy and security features has launched an AI chat assistant. The chat bot — Leo is built into the browser’s sidebar. Artificial intelligence chatbots have raised eyebrows among privacy-conscious Internet users due to their blatant invasion of privacy.
AI chatbots are data-hungry due to the fact that they are trained using data derived from across the Internet. The more (accurate) data you train AI chatbots with, the more they know. Brave prides itself on respecting your right to privacy. However, interest in AI assistants has exploded since ChatGPT’s wave of hype swept across the world.
Brave has chosen to implement their own AI chatbot to stay relevant, as the other major web browsers have already done so. Google — the developer of Chrome has also implemented an AI art generator that can be used to generate pictures. That feature is integrated in Google Search for now. However, it may find its way into Chrome or other Google apps in the future.
Brave says that Leo will not collect any more data than it needs to operate. Brave says it doesn’t require you to login, that it won’t record your conversations, and your conversations with it won’t be used to train its machine learning model.
The fact that it doesn’t require users to login is promising from a privacy standpoint, as requiring users to login is an effective way that other technology companies have been using to collect their data and track their usage. There is a free version of the Leo chat assistant, and a paid version.
Leo uses Meta’s open-source Llama 2 model. If Llama 2 is fully open-source, that would provide transparency around how data is collected and handled. Android and iOS versions of the Leo chatbot are expected in the coming months.
