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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

#281

Post by derangedHorse »

DarkUranium wrote: post #260
bcjdjsndon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits more in a morning than that

There are far more Google Chrome users than probably PlayStation & Steam users combined. Also, someone installing Steam is going to expect large downloads, hell, the platform tells you the size as you're about to start the download. I don't think anyone expects a browser to suddenly download 4GB, let alone behind their backs !

Have you ever watched a 2 hour lecture on Youtube? Next time check the memory consumption of the open tab.

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

#282

Post by ElFitz »

derangedHorse wrote: post #272

Does anyone else find the writing in the article to be overdramatic? Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices. To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 *tabs* open that nearly take up 4gb. The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion. > The roughly 4 GB × N device…

> Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices.

4gb definitely isn’t a negligible amount of space on most people’s devices.

The quite successful it would seem MacBook Neo has 256GB of storage in its base configuration.

A MacBook Air and a basic sub $1000 Dell laptop starts at 512GB.

> To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 tabs open that nearly take up 4gb.

You are conflating disk and memory.

> The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion.

There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.

But I also see the point in it. We recently did a hackathon, and I considered relying on Gemma 4 for privacy considerations. The local model could interpret the user’s natural language request and derive less privacy revealing requests to form based on that.

But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.

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

#283

Post by jeroenhd »

nalekberov wrote: post #239
jeroenhd wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech. When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead. As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have litt…

> When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech. Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did. EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.

Google has invested massively into security. On various platforms (non-Chromium Linux excluded), Google Chrome uses advanced defence-in-depth that make Chrome much more secure than Firefox on the same machine. Their origin-based process separation make Chrome a memory hog but protect tab processes from each other in a way Firefox doesn't bother with just yet.

Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.

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

#284

Post by dspillett »

sevenzero wrote: post #52
chinathrow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox.

[flagged]

Even youtube's app itself doesn't allow that unless you pay. I suspect they've nobbled most browsers into not allowing it, either by technical measures or (more likely) the strong-arm tactic of saying “if you don't block this we'll find a way to make the entire of youtube practically unusable on your browser”.

I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.

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

#285

Post by dist-epoch »

z3t4 wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #6

Not on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.

Auto update is basically a root backdoor, it's especially troublesome when you are not the customer, you are the product!

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don't want to be the product.

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

#286

Post by acchow »

tthu1 wrote: post #51
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.

What is a lot of traffic to you? 2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic. I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.

Wikipedia say 3.6 billion Chrome users.

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

#287

Post by Wowfunhappy »

scriptsmith wrote: post #166
wuschel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's based on Gemma 3n, and it's not the best. I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images & audio. It can write longer prose, but it's pretty bad. It can also write text in the format of a JSON schema or regexp for anything you might want to do with structured data.

I wonder why they’re using Gemma 3 and not Gemma 4?

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

#288

Post by purerandomness »

sevenzero wrote: post #52
chinathrow wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox.

[flagged]

Why not simply use NewPipe [0]?

You also get ad filtering and you can download Audio/Video streams from within the app.

[0] https://newpipe.net/

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

#289

Post by ElFitz »

expedition32 wrote: post #243
jeroenhd wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Google stuffs AI into everything, people shrug. Can't expect anything else from big tech. When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead. As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have litt…

Mozilla is nice enough to let you opt out. I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.

Offering something like a local Gemma 4 (though apparently not what we get here) to web apps via a browser API could change UX quite drastically. Possibly for the better. We had a project where it could have been nice.

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

#290

Post by derangedHorse »

scorpioxy wrote: post #14
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?

Maybe consent is not an appropriate term. Perhaps an acknowledgement and a way to say "I don't want this" would be a more suitable approach. I feel like a flag to turn off LLMs is useful. Firefox added something like this in a recent release. I don't know how much they're downloading or how much they run it, nor would I be a good judge if it's necessary or not, but I don't want that functionality in my browser so tur…

There's a setting in `chrome://flags` mentioned in the post that allows users to turn this off. I guess people want opt-in consent rather opt-out consent which there's always debate about. Some people say it degrades the experience for the majority of users who would opt-in for the happiness of the few possibly already detracting users.
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