Brave is a Chromium-based browser that has its own search engine, Brave, and restricts tracking for personal ads. The business has been pushing user privacy as a fundamental component of its offering. Leo, a three-month-old generative AI assistant developed on top of Claude from Anthropic and Llama 2 from Meta, is another new product from Brave that places a strong emphasis on privacy.
Leo offers far greater privacy protections than ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies. Braved doesn’t utilize your data to train its chatbot, and Leo doesn’t save chat histories. To use the bot, you also don’t need an account. Additionally, Brave won’t associate your account with the data you use if you choose the premium experience, which is less expensive than ChatGPT Plus.
Leo has been under testing for three months, which is why I called it a ChatGPT rival. However, Brave is currently rolling out Leo to all Brave users running 1.60, the most recent version of the desktop browser. The Leo emblem should appear in the browser’s sidebar as soon as Brave makes it available to you. In the upcoming months, Leo support for Brave will be added for both Android and iPhone.
Let s talk about privacy first
User privacy is one of my main concerns with generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT and Google Bard. Furthermore, the development of generative AI in the future that will enable personal AI interests me more. I will only utilize these goods if they offer more privacy than what I can get from the less individualized generative AI experiences I’ve had thus far.
Leo from Brave might help set the standard in that area, since Brave advertises the chatbot’s unmatched privacy characteristics right away.
To begin with, Leo can be accessed without an account. This implies that you can stop verifying your phone number or email. Leo is available (or soon will be available) in the sidebar.
For a monthly fee of $15, you can subscribe to Leo Premium and receive unlinkable tokens that will verify your access. An further precaution to guarantee that your behavior is private to you and you alone is that Brave can never link your purchase information with how you use the product.
Furthermore, according to the business, this is a distinctly private credentialing experience because the email you used to establish your account cannot be connected to how you regularly use Leo.
According to Brave, all Leo requests will be sent via an anonymous server, meaning that Leo traffic cannot be connected to your IP address.
Moreover, Leo’s conversations will no longer be stored on Brave’s servers. They will be thrown away as soon as they are formed. Leo also won’t learn from those conversations. Moreover, Brave will not gather your IP address or any other personally identifiable information. Leo will not gather user data, nor will any other third-party model suppliers. Considering that Leo is based on two language models, that is significant.
Recall that Claude is from Anthorpic. Compared to OpenAI, that business aims to produce more morally-driven generative AI products. However, Leo also uses Meta’s Llama 2 access. User privacy isn’t typically protected by the social media behemoth. Not that utilizing Leo will allow Brave’s Llama to eavesdrop on anyone.
These privacy features are seldom matched by ChatGPT from OpenAI. Recall that OpenAI did not allow you to choose not to transfer your data to the ChatGPT servers for several months.
What can Leo and Leo Premium do?
Brave can provide you with a generative AI experience that is comparable to Google Bard and ChatGPT. Leo is able to create content, describe movies or webpages, and respond to inquiries about it. In addition, it has the ability to modify, analyze, and translate pages.
The Llama 2 language model from Meta is the foundation of the Leo experience.
Access to Claude Instant, Anthropic’s lighter and quicker model with exceptional coding and logical thinking skills, will be available with Leo Premium. This substitute for ChatGPT can assist with more complex arithmetic and coding prompts. Leo Premium can respond to your cues in various languages and can also converse in them.
Leo Premium members will have access to more models, greater rate limits, better-quality talks, priority queuing during peak usage hours, and first dibs on new features and enhancements, according to Brave.
Additionally, according to the business, Anthropic trained Claude 2, its most recent language model, on high-quality data using Brave’s Search API in order to maximize Claude’s outputs for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) queries.
How to access Leo
Leo will be positioned on the sidebar, as seen in the pictures above, which were supplied by Brave. To locate it, look for an asterisk in a conversation bubble. You are not running Brave 1.60 or above if the red icon is not there. Perhaps your area was not included in the Leo rollout. For instance, I am unable to access Leo on Brave at the moment of writing.
Asking a question in the address bar and selecting the aforementioned Ask Leo icon is another way to communicate with Leo.