551–560 of 1001 posts
Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
I agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?
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.
That is actually an interesting question. I would think that any given amount of processing is at least slightly more efficient when running on large-scale cloud hardware, but I have no idea whether it's a few percent or 75%. There's also some overhead, so maybe there's no gain for smaller jobs.
...so what? If Chrome had installed 4GB for some other tooling that most people don't need, would anyone care? My operating system installs with a million default packages that I don't need. Users install applications with optional features all the time. Applications install additional tooling so that they'll function all the time. To the other point: of course Claude Desktop modifies the browser--that's how it works…
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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.
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You can already trigger a 2 GB model download with the Summarizer API[0], which is already shipped in Chrome. Summarizer.create() [0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/summarizer-api#model-do... I think this is a distinct model from the Prompt API, since the other shipped AI APIs use fine tuned models.
So now we're up to 6 GB
If you back up to "intention" it's fully insane to make a GDPR argument against on-device AI. Yes it downloads bits, but those bits are not there to identify you - they are basically a local copy of the internet. This enables private data to be kept on-device . Having no personal data leave the device is fantastic for GDPR compliance. The good point in this article is about how the "AI" features in Chrome all use Goo…
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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...)
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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.
> 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. Really? I'm a total amateur when it comes to doing anything with local models but I tried a few in this range using ollama at this point, and they didn't seem to know much about anything, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to search the web or run other tools,…
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I think a local AI model is appreciated, but it being bundled and executed through Chrome, I expect that more or less all data get exfiltrated by Google. They simply read your mails, how would you expect there to be anything resembling decency in a company like that? It is the ad business. Bad thing is that people still use gmail.
Doesn't google already extract every single letter you put into the address bar as you type? The idea that the model is local is just Privacy Washing. What's the chance they aren't capturing your prompts somehow? For "Telemetry" so they can triage bugs of course!
I'm more inclined to think it's cost unloading. Move their cloud GPU costs to your desktop.
Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practical discussion to have. Framing it around consent is unnecessarily inflammatory and makes it harder to have a discussion, not easier.