Building Brave: Private Search, One AI Layer at a Time with Josep M. Pujol

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:35)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share my conversation with Josep Pujol, Chief of Search at Brave.
As regular listeners will know, Brave has been a sponsor of The Cognitive Revolution for the last several months, and that makes this our first sponsored episode. I think it's important to mention that right at the top for the sake of transparency, though I did approach this episode in exactly the same way that I always do, with a deep dive into the company's products and an earnest search for insights that will be worth your precious time. And I can sincerely say that I believe this episode maintains the quality standard that we always strive for.
As you'll hear, Josep was very open and shared a number of fascinating details about how Brave has built their search product and infrastructure over time, including the trade-offs that they accept to maintain the highest standard for user data privacy. Some of the most interesting details center around the challenges of iteratively improving an AI-powered product while operating at real scale. Brave handles over 1 million searches per hour or roughly 300 searches per second. They do not want to take any steps backward, and so their approach is generally to add to their system, making their ensemble of models and techniques more effective, but also more complicated with each generation. I found this approach really fascinating to learn about, as it's a perspective not often found in younger startups. I also appreciated Josep's candid perspective on the challenges they face in evaluating search results. Brave has developed some scalable systems to assist in measuring quality, but Josep emphasized that there still is no fully automated substitute for hands-on human evaluation, good taste, and judgment. I think this, too, is an important lesson for all AI Builders to keep in mind. Coming away from this conversation, I genuinely believe that the Brave Search API is an excellent product. I've spent more time testing it since the recording, and for the Waymark Small Business Profile Builder, which today relies primarily on scraping small business websites, I did find it to be notably better than both Bing and Google. As such, I have recommended it to the Waymark product team. My expectation is that, like Brave, we will augment rather than replace our existing system, we'll use the Brave Search API to help us return results faster, to cover URLs that our scraper fails on, and to surface valuable bonus context from discussion and review sites that we simply aren't tapping into today at all.
Overall, I think it will be a really nice product win, and given the low cost and latency, I think it's something that more AI Builders should consider using.
If you'd like to check it out for yourself, I've created a simple Google Collab Notebook, which makes search API calls to Brave, Google, and Bing. It's nothing fancy, but this is exactly what I've used to evaluate it for Waymark. We'll put the link to that notebook in the show notes. Finally, before we get started, if your company is interested in sponsoring the Cognitive Revolution and potentially being featured in an episode, I invite you to reach out. We'll always be fully transparent about sponsorships, and we will only produce sponsored episodes with companies that I personally judge to be worthwhile on their merits. So my hope is that this will be a win-win for the show, for the sponsor, and most importantly, for you, the audience.
As always, we hope you'll share the show with friends and we invite your feedback. And with that, I hope you enjoyed this inside look at Brave Search and the Brave Search API with Brave's Chief of Search, Josep Pujol. Josep Pujol, Chief of Search at Brave. Welcome to the Cognitive Revolution.