301–310 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 current…
I never conflated anything. I said it's a neglible amount of space for current hardware, which I still believe.
If anything, the fact that I think the amount of space is acceptable for the amount of ram a modern laptop has exaggerates the point.
> There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.
That's the approach they take for most of their features.
> 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.
Which seems to be the motivation of having these local models embedded in the browser's available resources: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api
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 not a very good small model to be honest. That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for. Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
We can be positive the entire motivation of Chrome is user behavior surveillance. There's not a nano-chance in all the multiverses that Chrome model is doing anything privately. They've gone to extraordinary length to accomplish this. It's not for free.
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.
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 not a very good small model to be honest. That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for. Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online. It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
I’ve been using Firefox for 20+ years and continue to do so, but let’s not pretend that Firefox hasn’t been an embarrassing shit show for most of the past 15.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been consuming 15+ years of anti-Mozilla rants anytime it or Firefox are mentioned online. It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
I mean ... frankly, and I say this as a guy who's used solely Firefox since before it was Firefox all the way until 2025 when I finally got sick & tired of their shit... (now on WaterFox because I refuse to submit to the Google browser monopoly) ... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.