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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

#671

Post by Dig1t »

ljm wrote: post #615
crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. 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 practic…

In principle I agree, but chrome has an auto-update setup and using that mechanism to download several GBs of data that is not critical to the app itself is cause for question. Chrome is not entitled to my disk space just because I installed it and Microsoft has been excoriated for the exact same behaviour with AI.

>Chrome is not entitled to my disk space just because I installed it

When you install any program it becomes entitled to your disk space, by the definition of installation. If you don’t like the program, you can just uninstall it and it’ll no longer take up your disk space.

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

#672

Post by notnullorvoid »

The whole Prompt API is poorly designed. Devs will end up trying to fine tune very specific prompts out of necessity, only to have them break with the next model update.

The logic around not providing access to model version to prevent fingerprinting is laughable when the suggestion to counteract fingerprinting from prompting is the model should only update when user agent string updates. Just put the damn API behind a explicit user permission.

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

#673

Post by xp84 »

eCa wrote: post #633
crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. 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 practic…

Couldn't the same argument be made for Chrome suddenly including a bitcoin miner? Seems like that would be a difference in degree rather than in kind.

The difference would be intent. A nearby comment worries that the endgame is the ODM being used to monitor you and report back. Certainly wouldn't put it past the world's biggest ad company to think of that! And if that is what purpose it's put to, I think I'll be mad too.

If Chrome shipped a crypto miner and used the resulting coins generated on my device to let me automatically bypass paywalls with micropayments that would be way better than if they shipped the same and just took the coins.

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

#676

Post by wtallis »

nsvd2 wrote: post #639
bearjaws wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious if it reuses the LLM across all tabs, hard to imagine most machines can boot up 1-2 of any 4gb model unless its a more powerful system.

I think it obviously will, what would be the benefit to spinning up more than one copy?

It should only need to load one copy of the weights, but each tab/site will need a separate context and KV cache.

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

#677

Post by xp84 »

thorum wrote: post #625
crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. 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 practic…

You’re probably right in a literal technical sense, but a very large number of people (maybe most?) would choose “no” if properly informed and asked for consent, and lots of people are morally opposed even in principle to downloading a large AI model onto their computer. I’m not one of them, but they’re out there. So in a cultural sense, it is different.

What % of Chrome users (this is the default browser that nearly every 'normal person' uses) do you think is confident (and knowledgeable) enough to answer this quiz:

  For each, indicate whether it's closest to: 4MB, 4GB, or 400GB:

  1. One MP3 song.

  2. A 2-hour movie streamed from Netflix at 4K

  3. The capacity of this computer's SSD.

  4. The free space on the SSD.

  5. The whole of English Wikipedia not including images

  6. a AAA game from 2010 with all its supporting files and DLC

  7. a AAA game from 2026 with all its supporting files and DLC

  8. The total of all software updates you installed last month
I'd say maybe 5% could get 80% of those right. So, most people would be purely guessing the same way I'd be guessing if you asked me if I want 800mg of Beta-Carotene for $1. I don't know for sure if I need any Beta-Carotene, and if I did need some I wouldn't know if 800mg is a little, just right, or way more than I'd ever need, because I'm not a nutritionist.

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

#678

Post by aucisson_masque »

jchw wrote: post #585
crazygringo wrote: post #560

Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. 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 practic…

It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of. Reminds me a bit of back when installing software was a minefield due to all of the integrated "promotions" for things like toolbars, only now they've vertically integrated the unwanted software, cutting out the middleman. Honestly, for most features you could justifiably say its fine. I mean honestly, how large is an Englis…

The issue is the size of the 'update' and the impact it'z going to have on your computer performance.

If tomorrow Google was to include a Blockchain miner in Google chrome, you'd still say you consented to it by using their software ?

Because I'm pretty sure that this LLM is also going to be used by Google to gather data on the user and feeding it to Google, hence just like the Blockchain miner using our computer ressources (space & performance) to feed Google yearly benefits.

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

#679

Post by davb »

An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again.

As much as I’m against unexpected 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.

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

#680

Post by AmazingEveryDay »

luke727 wrote: post #587

The majority of comments seem to think this is not a big deal. Not surprising from this crowd, but disconcerting nonetheless.

Agreed, very disappointing. I wonder if this was 40gb would it still be celebrated? 100gb? At what point, if ever would this be recognized as an unwanted waste of space?
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