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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

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Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#141

Post by zekrioca »

TheServitor wrote: post #23

Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.

The same old individualistic fallacy [1] of highlighting individual effects to hide global effects, all while compromising user privacy. In reality this will be continuous million of devices downloading these useless weight files.

[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#143

Post by izacus »

nottorp wrote: post #4
ponyous wrote: post #3

The site is currently unavailable 503 so I can't read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?

Extra power and ram usage without your permission, for example.

Does that include the CPU burning cat girl captchas or not?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#144

Post by keyringlight »

mschuster91 wrote: post #55
TheServitor wrote: post #23

Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.

There are multiple problems here. For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspo…

Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable and from google's side worth doing whether the users is paying for the service or not, and each of them will have more power usage with some reduced battery life on portable devices. At that scale I'd also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU/GPU/NPU.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#145

Post by cluckindan »

nottorp wrote: post #4
ponyous wrote: post #3

The site is currently unavailable 503 so I can't read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?

Extra power and ram usage without your permission, for example.

Hello iOS upgrade.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#146

Post by potatototoo99 »

simianwords wrote: post #101

Sorry but the whole climate angle on this is extremely stupid and needs to be challenged. I have noticed this new phenomenon of people using climate as a trump card to oppose any thing they don’t like. The thing about these kind of arguments is that any economic activity or any sort of action involves some load on climate. The magnitudes are important. In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emission…

There is consumer demand for hamburgers. There is no consumer demand for AI, hence how egregious that it also comes with negative externalities.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#147

Post by wuschel »

scriptsmith wrote: post #31

If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create() https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api Wh…

It is a small model, so what utility can I / Google expect from it? What is the on-board model used for?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#148

Post by vrganj »

pu_pe wrote: post #33
jve wrote: post #24

> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms. > For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (m…

Some parts of the anti-AI movement are becoming so unhinged that now any use of compute is considered an environmental threat. This degrowth mentality needs to die.

Our planet is literally dying.

The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]

Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.

What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w

[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...

[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#150

Post by vrganj »

pu_pe wrote: post #116
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I reminder you what unlimited growth means and how it ends up in biology? Society/technology is no exception.

No need for unlimited growth, just normal sustainable progress like the one that allows you and me to communicate here after centuries of technological progress.

The "normal sustainable progress" has already pushed us to the brink of extinction. AI is rapidly accelerating our resource use, with nothing good to show for it.
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