(Credit: Brave)
Privacy-focused browser Brave's AI tool Leo can now analyze your Google Drive files and create summaries of your PDFs for you, Brave announced Thursday.
Because Leo AI is built into the web browser's sidebar, users can only ask Leo to check out content that's already open within Brave, including Google Docs, Sheets, PDF files, and YouTube videos. Leo can also parse your Slack web messages and pull out key topics from chats and threaded conversations. Leo won't be able to check out content in your Slack app if you have it, but Slack also launched its own AI tool recently.
In Google Docs, Leo can automatically make writing suggestions or review your text for you once complete. In Sheets, it can look at spreadsheet data and answer questions about that information. It's now also able to transcribe YouTube videos for you, and you can ask Leo questions about the YouTube videos after the transcript is made.
Leo first launched to all Brave users in November 2023, offering both a simpler free version and more powerful premium edition that costs $15 a month. Leo arrived with the ability to parse, summarize, and answer questions about most web pages online including recipes on cooking sites, provide translations, and transcribe most online audio and video files as well.
Both Leo versions were primarily trained on variants of Meta's open-source generative AI Llama models, but Brave switched Leo over to primarily use Mistral AI's Mixtral 8x7B model back in January. Users can still toggle between the model they want to use, however, with Mixtral, a version of Claude, and Llama 2 13b available at time of writing.
Brave Co-founder and CTO Brian Bondy clarified to PCMag via email that Brave isn't training any AI models itself. It's simply offering Leo as a way to connect Brave users to existing AI models to help them better navigate the internet.
When it comes to security, Brave hosts its own copy of the Mixtral model on its servers for Leo's use and doesn't keep any records or copies of user prompts on its servers, the company said in a statement. Brave also doesn't collect the IP addresses of Leo users.
"Brave uses a reverse proxy in front of the model to ensure no IP addresses are linked to the prompts," Bondy told PCMag. "Brave does not retain any prompts that are made to the model unless a user explicitly reports feedback to Brave on a specific interaction."
Brave also uses cryptography to ensure that user payments for Leo's premium version can't be traced to individual usage, meaning user activity can remain private. Brave's use of cryptography here doesn't have anything to do with crypto or blockchain, Bondy confirmed, though Brave does offer other crypto features like a built-in wallet and its own crypto token.
Brave also says that Leo conversations or prompts will not be used for model training, and it won't keep any personal data or allow its third-party model providers to collect it, either.
Like most AI tools, Leo isn't always going to give correct answers, though. When PCMag asked Leo how to get Leo's premium version three different times, Leo repeatedly said, incorrectly, that there is no premium version available.
Leo is currently available for macOS, Windows, and Linux desktop computer users, with plans for mobile Brave browser support slated to become available "very soon," according to the company's website.