Brave's AI assistant now integrates with PDFs and Google Drive

In my opinion, the goal of increasing automation has gone from a useful relief of labor to an obsession that will lead nowhere. Globally, this seems to be reflected only by increasing resource use and increasing ignorance of the natural world by producing purely for the sake of making consumerism more efficient.<p>AI assistant in a browser...it&#x27;s getting ridiculous.

Unrelated but about Brave and interesting to me: I recently found myself having a large upstream project that I need to maintain some custom patches for, and there&#x27;s a need for deeper customizations and I worry that my rudimentary system of applying .patch files will turn into an unmaintainable nightmare of merge conflicts after every rebase. I was thinking about possible solutions, and it occurred to me that Brave being Chromium-based must have this same challenge but an order of magnitude more difficult, so I looked for their code to see how they solved this issue.<p>It&#x27;s pretty interesting! They do basically the same thing for core Chromium, applying a (big) set of patches[1].<p>Incidentally, I&#x27;d be interested to hear any ideas&#x2F;approaches to this problem. I&#x27;m guessing if there was something clearly better, Brave would be doing it, but it seems like there <i>should</i> be a better way even if I can&#x27;t think of one.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brave&#x2F;brave-core&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;patches">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brave&#x2F;brave-core&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;patches</a>

The first browser to index (locally preferably) my browsing history and help me extract&#x2F;surface useful information from previous pages I have visited will win me over. So far they all seem to be offering the same kind of AI that will crawl the current page and extract information from it.

Asked it to extract some data from a spreadsheet. It&#x27;s first answer was wrong. I corrected it. It&#x27;s second answer was wrong.<p>That&#x27;s when I quit.<p>(It was a simple sheet. I said &quot;list the names of all items where [column name] is false&quot;. There was about 60 rows)

Isn&#x27;t Brave supposed to be a security first browser? I thought this was their whole thing? So why are they using a non-local LLM? Forget your thoughts on AI for a second, and just consider what has to be done for these tasks. If you ask it to summarize the page (like the example) it has so send the information elsewhere, off your computer. Same with the PDF. This really undermines security and creates an way that exposes all your data. Their paid service even uses Claude so not entirely controlled by them either if you fully trust them to E2EE that data and then not store it.<p>So according to Brave, using their AI leaks:<p>- your searches<p>- What you&#x27;re viewing<p>- What you&#x27;re typing<p>Did Brave just turn into the Chrome that it once so hated? I guess it is just orange chrome.

This is the first I&#x27;ve heard of Brave Leo. I hope Mozilla comes up with something competitive soon, or they might finally lose me as a user.

Is there a way to completely excise this feature from the browser?

Different topic, but can someone talk about which browser they use now? I’ve used Chrome for the past N years with ublock Origin, but recently I’ve been getting some ads on Youtube. Also some websites just didn’t work in Chrome. I switched to Brave a week ago and things seem ok, but it’s a weird browser with Tor built in, and also Spotify.com always crashes with a Memory problem. Does anyone have any thoughts on browser preference these days?

Everyone seems to use LLMs the wrong way. Instead of using them to do useful work (for example: static code analysis with automatic fixing of found bugs, writing high-quality documentation), they create useless dumb chatbots. Waiting for someone to integrate a chatbot into a calculator.

I tried it, it&#x27;s fairly good, solves a lot of the issues of not knowing the context that chat is using, but so far the responses are super lengthy. Sometimes they are even longer than the article itself haha

Am I weird by wanting this in Mozilla? Somehow Mozilla seems more trustworthy!! Not trying to be a bigot, just thinking out-loud.

When spyware is being called assistant. &quot;Amazing&quot; propaganda by corporation.

They are training off your data, I guarantee it

How do they support this financially?

spyware is now called assistant.

A lot of this new wave of &quot;privacy focused&quot; &quot;we&#x27;re not Chrome&quot; browsers are A) just Chrome and B) venture capital funded. They&#x27;re cool and fun now, but their ultimate goal is to burn VC money in a giant advertising pyre in hopes of pulling enough of the market away from Chrome to justify their existence. They&#x27;ll either fail and burn out, or succeed and promptly enshittify to be even worse than Chrome. Please just use Firefox.

Friends don&#x27;t let friends use Brave.