I use brave. Firefox doesn't work in my qemu VM with (none pass through) hardware acceleration, it just crashes the VM.
Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.
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
#212I was working on on-device AI for 3 years. This was the prime idea we were exploring, how can someone undercut the OS providers and ship an LLM that other apps can also use on-device.
Like if meta decides to do this, it can serve an API to all mobile app companies for an on-device LLM long before the OS is there.
This is Google's way of reaching LLM distribution on laptops, since they don't have their own
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is consumer demand for hamburgers. There is no consumer demand for AI, hence how egregious that it also comes with negative externalities.
I have to tell you something: there is consumer demand for AI.
We'll never know, since companies seem determined to make it non-optional.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Firefox as my main browser but occasionally run into Chrome requirements for certain web apps so end up begrudgingly installing it. I'm in the habit of going straight to the chrome flags page and turning off all this junk exactly because disk usage of chrome is ridiculous otherwise.
Like what? I think the only time I've ever had to use Chrome instead of Firefox was because of some USB device thing that worked inside Chrome. Otherwise everything just works in Firefox.
The sites my colleagues and I produce. They consider Chrome === Standard and everything else a deviation for which they may begrudgingly fix obvious bugs in once pressed. It's seldom that entire sites will break in other browsers, but instead they simply do not work in some ways like modals sometimes breaking, or XHR requests failing, or performance being bad.
It's frustrating.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#215On one level, I can't figure out how bent out of shape to get over this (but read on). Software I use downloads updates all the time, adds new features all the time, and I mostly don't ask for any of it.
So if you see this as just a new feature that provides some on-device AI, it's a bit, so what? A new feature? The last GT7 or Flight Sim patch was bigger than this, what's the big deal, etc.
However, that's not really what's going on. It theory Chrome gives you a local LLM that can provide local AI powered features. In practice, everything gets sent to the cloud anyway so the local LLM seems mostly to exist as a disguise for that, which is shady AF.
As others have pointed out, the solution is https://www.firefox.com/. And whilst it's been trendy on HN for several years to slag off Firefox and Mozilla, I went back to Firefox as my daily driver several years ago, and Chrome's high-handed enforcement of Manifest V3 extensions (meaning no full fat uBlock Origin) has only served to cement that decision.
It's mostly been great. The only downside is that some sites don't work properly on Firefox, and I'm 99.999% sure that's not Firefox's fault.
For example, Paypal's post-login verification step breaks so every time I want to buy something using Paypal I have to switch to Chrome. And, no, disabling uBlock Origin and other extensions on Paypal doesn't help - I've done this already. Seriously, Paypal, it's been months: will you please just fix signing in and paying on Firefox, please?
And many sites will assume you're a bot first and ask questions later if you hit them with anything other than Chrome or Safari... which is also extremely lame and scummy.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#216One upside to this is that it doesn't use Gemma and instead uses Gemini. So at least for Gemini Nano (apparently called XS internally by Google) it means that the weights are now de facto open and you no longer need a current Android phone to get the latest and best model in this class. This also makes it the only open American frontier-level model right now.
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Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide any sources for that? I'd like to learn more about this open frontier model.
Sources for what? The pareto frontier of LLMs? How Google is pretty much on the line with most of their LLM products? Or this particular model? For the first two you need to look for size/cost vs. accuracy charts. There are tons of them floating around. For the latter there is not much official info except what you can infer by analyzing the weights.bin file that Chrome downloads. But it does mention Gemini in there,…
Sources for your claim that the model being downloaded to Android/Chrome is Gemini instead of Gemma. Other than downloading the bin file myself and analyzing it lol.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#218Google abuses users.
You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#219Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide any sources for that? I'd like to learn more about this open frontier model.
Sources for what? The pareto frontier of LLMs? How Google is pretty much on the line with most of their LLM products? Or this particular model? For the first two you need to look for size/cost vs. accuracy charts. There are tons of them floating around. For the latter there is not much official info except what you can infer by analyzing the weights.bin file that Chrome downloads. But it does mention Gemini in there,…
Just because it's called Gemini doesn't mean that it's somehow automatically as comparable with the frontier of small models as well, does it?