Brave browser officially launches Leo AI assistant; Leo Premium announced for $15 a month

Brave, the company behind the Brave web browser, has announced that its Leo AI assistant is now available for free for all Brave desktop users with the new version 1.60.

In an email press release, Brave states:

Leo, Brave’s browser AI assistant, can help with all sorts of tasks. It can create real-time summaries of webpages or videos. It can answer questions about content, or generate new content. It can even translate pages, analyze them, rewrite them, and more. Whether you're looking for information, trying to solve a problem, or creating content, Leo can help.

The company claims that Leo is also private and secure, stating that it won't record any chats you make with it or use them to train large language models. No login or account is needed to access the AI chatbot.

By default, Leo uses the Llama 2 LLM. However, Brave has announced that it has launched a subscription service for the chatbot, Leo Premium, that will give it access to other LLMs. Brave says:

Leo Premium subscribers will get access to Claude Instant, Anthropic's faster and lighter model that excels at logical reasoning and coding. The current version of Claude produces longer, more structured responses, follows instructions better than previous versions of Instant, and shows improvements in math, coding, multilingual abilities, and question answering.

Leo Premium will have other features including higher chat rate limits, and priority use during peak usage. The service will cost $15 a month and is available to purchase at Brave's site.

Brave is launching Leo in a period of some turbulence at the company. In October it announced it had laid off about 9 percent of its employees "as part of our cost management in this challenging economic environment." Later in that same month, it was discovered that the Windows version of Brave was also installing its VPN services without telling users. Brave said it will update the browser so it no longer installs the VPN apps.

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