Talk about a nothing burger. "OOh they downloaded 4GB!" You mean 30 minutes of Netflix? The carbon emissions thing apparently isn't a big deal since the author says the browser's AI use is cloud based anyway, and offloading AI compute from the DC to the browser isn't really increasing carbon is it? Reads like another AI doomer trying to find something to get angry about.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
461–470 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#462A 4gb unbidden download is insane! I'm still running machines with 30gb HDs.
I blame the kids these days (waggles fist), downloading their Pokiman shows at 4-5gb a pop! No respect for their disk space limited elders.
I'm actually gonna have to uninstall Chrome from a few machines tonight.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why is nobody building a paid for browser with built in search engine and LLM assistant? Should probably make it open source for transparency. And before anyone says you would build/compile it yourself if it was open source, those ppl are already running their self compiled tools and are not the target market.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which is why I uninstalled Chrome a (short...) while ago and my life went on unbothered.
I am amused when people fret about not using Chrome. I get it but… I have literally NEVER used Chrome. Perhaps I just don’t know what I am missing but the web seems to work just fine for me without it?
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#465How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.
They want to force the prompt API into being a defacto standard without getting buy in by the rest of the web standards body. Having it on by default serves this goal.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#466If 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?
Something to do with serving more ads. My guess is they will use this to “better target” or to drain more information from you for their ads.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#467> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point. 2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be…
0.04 to 0.1 kWh/GB is insane even for 2018 lol. I have gigabit internet (125 MB/s). This would imply when I'm downloading something I'm using 18 to 45 kW of electricity. Completely bonkers.
1.8 to 4.5 kW.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more severe problem is that Google installs model weight files on a per-user basis, meaning Chrome occupies 4 more GB of space for every OS user on your device.
The company I work at has several environments and hundreds of VDI users in each environment. Chrome is the default browser in all of them. By my rough napkin math, this one small change by Google will eat up at least 15 terabytes of new disk space in total. (I sure hope we are using deduplication at the physical storage layer...)
I certainly hope you don't automatically update.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#469Looks like the site's struggling to keep up with the traffic. A couple mirror links: https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp... https://archive.ph/sM7O5 (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)
Oh dear! Imagine all the carbon the many requests this server are using! Hoisted by their own petard…
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget the metric saying "99.97% of user have installed this" even though less than 1% of users know it exists, much less use it
Or "25% of users have used this in the last month" when it's made so easy to accidentally trigger it that the real usage is a few % at most.
it could easily be "after we replaced an existing UI element with a button to launch this instead, adoption increased 9001% month over month"