As if I needed yet another reason to not trust Brave. They keep jumping to each new shiny thing in tech, when they just need to keep to the core mission of a privacy-first browser.

I think it's brave

"But it's opt in! Just! don't use it!" --every Brave stan, ever

Yeah, I've noticed a strange subset of companies who are eager to add the "big new thing" to their products every once in a while, no matter what the thing is or how it's relevant to their main business. While I haven't paid attention to Brave much, I've seen some other companies jumping on AI just after hopping off the NFT/Crypto train from a year or two ago - whenever I see that, it's almost guaranteed that they don't actually care about AI or have any experts working on it, but just want to seem all cool and up-to-date.

(assumption) because their product is not appealing to a wide audience. the result? "let's add this feature to get [X hyped tech] users"

> The model behind Leo is Llama 2, a source-available large language model released by Meta with a special focus on safety. We’ve made sure that user inputs are always submitted anonymously through a reverse-proxy to our inference infrastructure. In this way, Brave can offer an AI experience with unparalleled privacy.

> We’ve specifically tuned the model prompt to adhere to Brave’s core values

I wonder what does this tuned version represents

Hopefully the prompt gets leaked soon enough. It's probably just generic "be helpful" with maybe a dash of "buy crypto, there are no other browsers".

reverse-proxy for access to their server - they claim they have no records of individual IP that way

Nobody records your IP when you confess your sins to a priest either. The things you say in these contexts are self-doxxing. Never trust AI privacy guarantees!

Especially from Brave. I like and use their mobile browser, but at one point their useragent had my fucking phone model imprinted in it (these days it only betrays that my phone is running Android 9). Their idea of "privacy" is a joke.

>at one point their useragent had my fucking phone model imprinted in it

That was pretty standard among browsers a couple years ago.

Among the self proclaimed privacy first ones as well apparently.

I like it so far!

Dear Brave Leo, how do I convince the Brave devs to finally implement Issue 9443 the "Bookmark All Tabs" button for Brave on Android[0]?

[0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/9443

To be fair to Brave, Firefox hasn't implemented this either.

Great, so now I can tell it "Block all cookie prompts on all sites, disable all javascript, and if what I click on doesnt react as it should because of turned off javascript, run the javascript code behind the element just that one time." ? No? So what is the chatbot actually capable of, telling me what is the weather gonna be tomorrow? Is it also able to tell me what the weather was yesterday?

My point being that AI chatbot could be incredibly powerful system, if always weren't implemented in the most basic way.

That is one major problem with conversational interfaces: their abilities are opaque.

If all your friends jumped off a bridge would you jump off too?

Brave showed me ads the second day that I used it, and frankly im thankful that they showed who they were so quickly. I had been nearly fooled

Is any adblocker perfect? The default setting in Brave is not the highest setting you can set it to.

As to your question: it depends on why they are jumping. If it is because a giant truck is going to run over us, I might join them, yes.

I think parent means Brave served them ads not that it missed some other site's ads.

I am aware of a link hijacking thing but not displaying ads by Brave.

It's disingenuous to market your product as privacy focused then put the onus on the user to actually make it private. You can do that with any browser. If you're just going to end up shaving the yak anyways why use Brave to begin with?

What’s not private about the ads. Brave uses a pretty ingenious way of serving targeted ads.

All the tracking is local on the device. The browser is sent an ad bundle. The browser chooses what ads to display, locally.

Also viewing ads to support the product is opt in, not opt out.

Is there some ethical gray area around an ad blocker funding itself by displaying different ads. Sure. Is it automatically anti-privacy to serve ads? I’m not so sure it is.

Brave on Android sent me ads as notifications with no discernible way to turn them off.

Seems pretty off brand honestly. I don’t see how this furthers their role as a trustworthy and privacy focused company.