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Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive
- greymalik 3y agoHow do they support this financially?
- temp0826 3y agoThey're at the top of the pyramid for their shitcoin. Probably one of the best modern grifts out there.
- rekoil 3y agoAnd regular advertising (where the audience doesn't get paid for consuming adverts) isn't a grift?
- bheadmaster 3y agoRegular advertising doesn't promise the user that they will get paid for clicking ads. Regardless, whataboutism doesn't make Brave's scheme any less of a grift.
- rekoil 3y agoFair enough, but you do get paid so that isn't a broken promise or anything, it's just not that much because their ad network hasn't really been much of an ad network. I had it enabled for a while, thought it was a great idea, but it's so little money that I've gone back to just disabling it personally.
- salad-tycoon 3y agoYou don’t need to click the ads. You swipe them away. It’s based on attention not clicking. Not trying to be pedantic but it’s a difference. You can also disable them. I did. Although when I had them on actually got some pretty good deals. Anyways, I just use safari these days and brave lives for YouTube for me to bypass ads and download for offline viewing.
- kibwen 3y agoWho ever said regular advertising isn't a grift? Advertising in general is just psychological manipulation designed to make you sadder and poorer by manufacturing a specific discontent in the victim and then selling them a supposed cure for that discontent.
- rekoil 3y agoThen isn't it better when they're upfront about it?
- kibwen 3y agoIf someone's going to kick me in the groin, then I suppose it's technically better to be up-front about the fact that they're going to kick me in the groin, but in truth I'd just rather not be kicked in the groin at all, thanks.
- CaffeinatedDev 3y agoThey are running mixtral, which is open source, so they can keep LLM costs to a minimum since they're probably running on their own hardware Also I think they have loads of funding, and are factoring all of this into user acquisition costs
- soundnote 3y agoThe AI, specifically? Pretty strict usage limits for free users and a paid plan is the plan, it looks like.
- donkeyboy 3y agoDifferent topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on browser preference these days?
- timeon 3y agoFirefox is safe bet. But not sure why would Brave have special problem with Spotify, it is Chromium based.
- ejb999 3y agoI use brave exclusively for years - zero problems - seems faster to me than other options. Also use it with Spotify and can't remember ever having an issue (brave on mac if it makes a difference). Yes it has Tor built-in, but you don't ever need to use it - it's just there in case you do (I have never needed it myself).
- web3-is-a-scam 3y agoI’ve been using Firefox for nearly two decades and I’d be hard pressed to switch now. I’m practically married to it: through sickness and health.
- dwighttk 3y agoI use Brave for YouTube and things that require Chrome and Safari for everything else. Oh… Firefox for when I want to load Facebook. Like once a quarter.
- polyvisual 3y agoBrave is great. I disabled all the web3 stuff and tidied up the homepage so it doesn't show me all the news etc. The only issue I have is that the sync between my iphone, macbook, windows can sometimes get out of sync.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
- _the_special_ 3y agoThe first browser to index (locally preferably) my browsing history and help me extract/surface useful information from previous pages I have visited will win me over. So far they all seem to be offering the same kind of AI that will crawl the current page and extract information from it.
- Sabinus 3y agoIf Firefox could sprint some good APIs in they could get some incredible plugins going.
- vdaea 3y agoI don't know much about the WebExtensions api but it's likely the apis are already there.
- freediver 3y agoHow much would you be ready to pay for that?
- rplnt 3y agoFully local (or private cloud sync) I would go as high as $2 a month. Cloud based solution, which is the only solution I expect, not interested just yet. (note: not OP)
- davidy123 3y ago$0, unless maybe someone finds a way to not pillage the data of the service and add a lot of actual value, and doesn't squat on this ultimately simple thing that should be a small piece of a much larger thing. open source AI and browser/OS companies are going to provide an answer soon anyway.
- Moldoteck 3y agoI guess this can be done with an extension that would work on all browsers. Like parse each page, save compressed text that supports fast decompressing (maybe even images), build tf/idf + cosine distance for verbantim searches & save in db and maybe add some ai to enhance the search. The next steps would be custom ai searches like "show me pages related to x", it'll quickly decompress the pages & apply the search for each but there are different approaches, like maybe saving history on a server and apply some ai model with huge context or do an initial filtering with tf/idf and apply ai after that.
- vouaobrasil 3y agoIn my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be reflected only by increasing resource use and increasing ignorance of the natural world by producing purely for the sake of making consumerism more efficient. AI assistant in a browser...it's getting ridiculous.
- rplnt 3y ago> for the sake of making consumerism more efficient If only. This wave of AI integrations is primarily focused on pleasing (potential) investors.
- WillAdams 3y agoYou need customers who bring in money to please investors over the long-haul.
- benreesman 3y agoIf only. This wave of AI integrations is happening in a context/framework for normalizing naked avarice so that preposterous power can be concentrated in the hands of the rich and dubiously ethical.
- Almondsetat 3y agoYou just assert that it is ridiculous without any motivations
- realharo 3y agoAI assistant in a browser makes sense if it's acting as an extension of your memory - for example you're browsing some items you're considering buying, and the assistant creates a summary spreadsheet with their comparison, that you can later look at, etc. Could be useful for things like real estate. Most AI tools I've seen however can't seem to get away from the classic "prompt -> response" chat UI.
- surajrmal 3y agoSome ai features make a lot of sense. Automatically organizing tabs is amazing for helping me not get lost in a sea of tabs. Longer form auto complete saves me time, at least on mobile. I used to rely on Reddit comments to summarize trashy low quality articles to give me the primary points. Now that I've been reddit sober for a while, it's been helpful to have my browser do that summarization for me, helping me stay away from Reddit. I can't say I will use every ai feature, but so far they've been helpful. I don't feel more ignorant. What I think makes people ignorant is outsourcing labor tasks like a cleaner for the home, a gardener for the yard, or handyman for basic repairs. I don't think those are necessarily wrong to outsource though.
- ss64 3y agoFriends don't let friends use Brave.
- pcdoodle 3y agoYou mean chrome
- tomrod 3y agoBrave for mobile, Firefox for desktop. Firefox on mobile is a poor experience for accessibility. Also, in my experience, the delivery was quite better for Firefox Mobile before 2021. Not sure what all changes, but it really impacted my use.
- rekoil 3y agoI really don't get this hate Brave gets on HN and other tech forums. It's a de-Googled Chromium fork which retains support for Manifest v2 extensions and has a bunch of neat extra features like first-party ad-blocking, an (underused and probably at this point should be considered a failed experiment) advertising network where users are paid for the ads they consume, Tor-integration, Web3 integrations. Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features, but that's just it, a default setting, it isn't hard to disable if you don't want to "take part of the experiment".
- jorvi 3y ago> Yes, it defaults to enabling their advertising features It does not, you have to opt in. You are right in the rest of your comment thought. And in general, when you compare default configs, Brave does far more to protect your privacy than Firefox does.
- rekoil 3y agoOh it's opt-in now? It used to be opt-out, good change.
- 3y ago
- andybak 3y agoAsked it to extract some data from a spreadsheet. It's first answer was wrong. I corrected it. It's second answer was wrong. That's when I quit. (It was a simple sheet. I said "list the names of all items where [column name] is false". There was about 60 rows)
- classified 3y agoI'm sure your spreadsheet software has a function for that. This will qualify your spreadsheet software as AI since it's smarter than the other AI.
- lupusreal 3y agoThis is the first I've heard of Brave Leo. I hope Mozilla comes up with something competitive soon, or they might finally lose me as a user.
- mcpar-land 3y agoA lot of this new wave of "privacy focused" "we're not Chrome" browsers are A) just Chrome and B) venture capital funded. They're cool and fun now, but their ultimate goal is to burn VC money in a giant advertising pyre in hopes of pulling enough of the market away from Chrome to justify their existence. They'll either fail and burn out, or succeed and promptly enshittify to be even worse than Chrome. Please just use Firefox.
- freedomben 3y agoUnrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there's a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue. It's pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1]. Incidentally, I'd be interested to hear any ideas/approaches to this problem. I'm guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there should be a better way even if I can't think of one. [1] https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches https://github.com/brave/brave-core/tree/master/patches
- SushiHippie 3y agoI don't know why they went with patch files instead of forking chromium and rebasing the changes via git. They document how developers should "rebase" chromium: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Chromium-rebases#fix-patches https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Chromium-rebases... And it looks like way more work than doing it with git via git rebase chromium/master
- fabrice_d 3y agoIf you do that kind of rebase you have to force-push to your branch, and that's not great for many reasons. The other option is to `git merge chromium/master` into your fork. This way you don't have to force-push, but the history is not that clean and bisecting can be tricky.
- SushiHippie 3y agoAh true didn't think of that, as I've never worked on such large projects were force pushing becomes a problem. But with manually editing .patch files you need to manually find out how to resolve the conflicts, while in a rebase git at least shows you the merge conflicts.
- surcap526 3y agoWhen spyware is being called assistant. "Amazing" propaganda by corporation.
- surcap526 3y agospyware is now called assistant.
- beAbU 3y agoIs there a way to completely excise this feature from the browser?
- codedokode 3y agoEveryone seems to use LLMs the wrong way. Instead of using them to do useful work (for example: static code analysis with automatic fixing of found bugs, writing high-quality documentation), they create useless dumb chatbots. Waiting for someone to integrate a chatbot into a calculator.
- zilti 3y agoThe last things I'd want an AI to do is "fixing" bugs, closely followed by writing documentation. It will confidently make things worse and break them.
- godelski 3y agoIsn't Brave supposed to be a security first browser? I thought this was their whole thing? So why are they using a non-local LLM? Forget your thoughts on AI for a second, and just consider what has to be done for these tasks. If you ask it to summarize the page (like the example) it has so send the information elsewhere, off your computer. Same with the PDF. This really undermines security and creates an way that exposes all your data. Their paid service even uses Claude so not entirely controlled by them either if you fully trust them to E2EE that data and then not store it. So according to Brave, using their AI leaks: - your searches - What you're viewing - What you're typing Did Brave just turn into the Chrome that it once so hated? I guess it is just orange chrome.
- CaffeinatedDev 3y agoI tried it, it's fairly good, solves a lot of the issues of not knowing the context that chat is using, but so far the responses are super lengthy. Sometimes they are even longer than the article itself haha
- bozhark 3y agoThey are training off your data, I guarantee it
- bzmrgonz 3y agoAm I weird by wanting this in Mozilla? Somehow Mozilla seems more trustworthy!! Not trying to be a bigot, just thinking out-loud.