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

thatprivacyguy.com

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

#221
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan... Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded. Google you are sick!

Surely it will wait when the connection is marked as metered.

I definitely trust Google's team (and large trillion dollar companies with sufficient resources to do this) to make reasonable choices for their users... said, perhaps, someone ever? Certainly not me.

(I wanted to write something far snarkier and sarcastic but getting annoyed at google is like getting annoyed at a lawnmower/Oracle. That plus HN guidelines.)

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

#223
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All Gemini models sit around the frontier, especially if you go to smaller sizes. Google is actually more invested into efficiency than size unlike some of the other big providers.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How about Google itself?

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api

>With the Prompt API, you can send natural language requests to Gemini Nano in the browser.

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

#226

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.

4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?

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

#229
>Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.

Oh my god thats terrible I hope you continue this article in this mode and dont pivot to some unsubstantiated bs claim that makes absolutely no sense...

>At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

sigh.

Imagine if everyone on the planet start using a memory hogging, cpu chugging browser application what a terrible hazard that would be for the climate.

Oh and it might have an AI component in it.

This claim is worse than the AI in data centers boiling the earth claims.

We can measure carbon released down to the watt. If you have an issue with people using power, shut up and talk to your government about carbon taxation/moving to alternative power sources. trying to shame some power users, quite arbitrarily isn't just senseless its self defeating. Its a measurement problem, the second people start getting shaky measurements of what their neighbors are doing, they start trying to shift the blame.

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

#230
post #88
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using Firefox for years now. It's such a splendid experience. I can recommend the following extensions: - Youtube Enhancer - DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials - Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans) - Slop Evader - No Gender (a MUST for Germans) Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have. I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and…

For me the most important extension is uBlock Origin. It's worth switching to Firefox for this alone.

that + NoScript. That latter is a must for me.
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