On the Brave Search website (not in Browser), it is impossible to remove the Search with AI button even when toggling off the AI results (which when turned on, which it is by default, this setting will simply add AI results in the normal search, that is totally unacceptable).
For company reasons, my work browser is Chrome (in a choice between Chrome and Edge… Chrome it is. Edge shoves even more AI and bloat down your throat). Generally, Brave fits my needs as a search engine, but the AI push is rendering it unusable to me.
Furthermore, on the previously mentioned post, @Mattches offered to try and provide explanations as to why it wouldn’t be dropped and I would be very interested, agree or not!
What I offered was to loop in one of our Leo team members to offer an explanation. However, I do not think that is necessary at this time. The feature will not be completely removed from the browser — the team has put a lot of work and time into making Leo a useful tool that can compete with the current landscape.
If a particular city spends a lot of time, money and manpower on building a new stadium and puts the stadium in use, attracting visitors and provides a great viewing experience for many of the [sports] fans, that city is not going to tear down that stadium because some people don’t like it/use it/think the money should have been allocated differently, etc.
Telling us to “drop AI” is akin to telling that city to tear down the newly built stadium — it does not make sense nor can it be justified at this juncture.
If you do not want to use Leo AI, as stated in other threads, disable it, hide it and do not interact with it. There was a bug where the Answer with AI toggle was turning itself back on, which I opened an issue for here:
I believe this issue has already been resolved. I also pushed in that issue (and will continue to do so) to ensure that the AI button in the search field gets hidden when Answer with AI is disabled in settings. That said, you can still easily hide this element on the screen yourself, as I explain here:
Unfortunately this modus operandi cannot help with what I asked: the search website (and not the browser) does not allow to remove the function. The toggle only removes the automatic first answer of word salad, but does not remove the permanent “search with AI” button. I realise now you are tagged as browser support and that might have blurred the intent a bit.
My understanding (poor as it may have been) was that the offer was to gain an explanation as to why invest into AI so heavily, what you (as a team) intend to achieve with it. I understand though that you wouldn’t just drop the product entirely.
And don’t get me wrong: I am sure devs put good work into it. All props for that. But it doesn’t mean it’s useful for -or desired by- all, and Brave is generally about respecting its users choices. So I find it a shame it doesn’t extend to the website. Thank you for pushing this issue!
I will reach out again and try to get someone from the Leo team to give you an appropriate response.
As for the AI button in the search field, I explained in the post linked to above that while the toggle doesn’t disable it (even though I agree that it should), you can still disable it using the “block elements” feature:
Sorry I rephrased a bit in an edit as I was unclear.
I’m not using brave browser (for other reasons) in this context, thus the block element feature is absent.
A fantastic feature, that, it must be said.
Hey, Sampson here from the Brave team. Great question!
Speaking personally, there’s a lot of value that LLMs (or AI more generally) can add to traditional search engines. For decades we have had the experience of submitting a query, and then having that query loosely select relevant indexed results from a large database of pages and content. Not much has changed with this model over the years, in spite of dramatic changes to available technology in the industry.
Large Language Models (or AI, more generally) are providing a great deal of value in this space, even in their infancy. They are able to quickly summarize several pages of results, provide citations, more semantically process user queries, and more. When used carefully, they yield more value to the user than could ever be achieved under the traditional model. It also paves the way for additional types of interfaces, such as voice. The work we’ve shipped on Brave Search brings us one step closer to users being able to quickly and effortlessly find what they need, without even needing to perform a series of queries, each with some subtle variation to see what distinct results are returned.
There’s a lot that LLMs can do behind the scenes too. These models offer a more reliable parsing of user queries, enabling intent to be more clearly defined via the conversion of word/tokens into vectors. This has the potential to dramatically simplify various parts of the traditional search backend, which has had to develop various other clever approaches to weeding-out bad interpretations of user queries, typos, and more.
You’re absolutely right that Brave upholds and defends the user’s choice when and where possible. This is why you can still perform standard searches without the inclusion of summarized results. That said, I’m reminded of the famous quote attributed to Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” I believe we’re only scratching the surface of the potential and value offered by LLMs/AI, and users will be pleasantly surprised by various developments to come.
This was more genuine curiosity and I can’t thank you enough for taking the time.
I do hope your work pays off, especially in terms of accessibility (can never have too much of that), and that you can bake in better safeguards against hallucination than what we can see on many such LLMs (forcing source citation is definitely a must imo), as well as misuse.
Do you have any solution in mind for the other glaring issue, that is copyright infringement on training data?