Brave’s Leo enters the AI chatbot arena with privacy as its selling point – The Indian Express
The AI chatbot space is getting crowded, but Brave is throwing its hat in the ring with the launch of Leo, a new chatbot built directly into the privacy-focused Brave browser. With Leo, Brave is aiming to differentiate itself by baking in privacy protections other chatbots lack.
Brave has announced it is rolling out Leo for all desktop users running version 1.60 of the browser. The chatbot was initially launched for testing in the Nightly channel back in August, with plans to expand to all users in the coming months. Now, the rollout has begun, with the bot coming to more users over the next few days.
On capabilities, Leo hits the expected checklist – you can use it to translate text, answer questions, summarise web pages, and generate new content. However, Leo’s real standout feature is its focus on privacy. Brave claims chat requests are proxied through an anonymised server, there’s no need for an account, and responses are immediately discarded after they are generated.
“Leo combines this easy, free access to AI with the privacy focus of Brave. Chats with Leo are private, anonymous, and secure. Leo doesn’t record chats, or use them for model training, and no account or login is required to use Leo,” Brave said in its announcement.
This sets Leo apart from other chatbots like Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing Chat, which have more questionable privacy protections. It seems Brave is betting that privacy-conscious users will flock to Leo to avoid having their conversations logged and analysed.
By default, Leo is free for all Brave users, powered by Meta’s Llama 2 language model. For $15/month, users can upgrade to Leo Premium to access additional models like Anthropic’s Claude, which is optimised for logical reasoning. Premium users also get higher rate limits, priority access during peak times, and early access to new features.
