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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

#691

Post by EvanAnderson »

qudiqudi wrote: post #684
davb wrote: post #679

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 4G…

Why not force a light-weight browser and prohibit Chrome?

That would create vastly more support issues. You don't get to choose the software your users need.

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

#692

Post by ElFitz »

derangedHorse wrote: post #302
ElFitz wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You are conflating disk and memory. 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 fe…

> 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.

How does the memory usage of your browser tabs relate to the amount of disk space taken up by the downloaded models?

> That's the approach they take for most of their features.

And there’s a reason for that. Same one the EU forced companies to make consent to marketing and consumer data sharing opt-in and not opt-out: we have a bias.

> Which seems to be the motivation of having these local models embedded in the browser's available resources

Sooo… we are basically agreeing on the fact it could prove to be useful? In the long run, if and when they decide to pick a model that isn’t half brain dead (apparently it’s based on Gemma 3).

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

#693

Post by postalrat »

baq wrote: post #434

I don't get the outrage. AAA games routinely take 100-200 GBs. I certainly prefer local inference to feeding google my private data over the network (assuming they actually don't do that anyway...)

AI haters think their activism is going to make a difference what other people want.

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

#694

Post by beaugunderson »

beaugunderson wrote: post #450
jasonlotito wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent. This does not happen. The model is not downloaded unless the user intentionally uses the feature that requires it. Then it's downloaded at that point.

untrue, I’ve deleted it many times in the last year. I don’t think this is new.

ah, yeah, first showed up in April of 2025

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

#695

Post by grayhatter »

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…

> Framing it around consent is unnecessarily inflammatory and makes it harder to have a discussion, not easier.

For me the most significant problem is the lack of consent. I assume it's just not how you want to frame the problem. Ignoring the problematic parts or behavior of some sort of behavior is a common problem in modern software, and it's actually what the article is complaining about.

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

#696

Post by munk-a »

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…

If Rockstar games can be criticized for Hot Coffee then Chrome can absolutely be criticized for such bloat ware.

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

#698

Post by titzer »

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 just part of the software.

What isn't part of the software? Can they just install as much garbage they want to, as long as they claim it is part of the "browser"?

Also, scale absolutely matters. If I pull up in front of your house and say "hey, mind if I park here?" and you say yes, then I park, walk away, and 10 minutes later park a fleet of 18 wheelers in front of your house, you're going to feel like I wasn't...entirely forthcoming about what I intended.

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

#699

Post by munk-a »

xp84 wrote: post #649
jchw wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle…

I, personally, have found the adtech bloat (for both disk space and processor usage) to be a huge issue for quite some time. If this is the hill where the public decides to take a stand I'll happily stand beside them to try and reverse this gradual enshittification. I think several other hills were more worthy to defend but nobody noticed those ones so apparently this is the place to fight that fight.

I doubt anyone would appreciate software bloat purely because of how widespread it is[1] - it just hasn't risen to the level where it's so noticeable for such a contemporarily controversial topic yet.

1. As an aside - ubisoft game sizes are absolutely bonkers. I didn't realize that each Assassin's Creed had twelve different operating systems crammed into it but I can't see how else they're clocking in where they do.

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

#700

Post by grayhatter »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #474

This might be worth it if Gemma4 E2B were a good model, but honestly it's absolutely useless in all our testing without further training and finetuning, and those aren't usecases that are fit for normal web browser use such that one would care to support it by adding such overly broad and expensive infrastructure to make it happen. Gemma 4 E4B is a much better model, but it's too large to simply download and run ever…

> Google's going through a lot of effort to release a model that will give everyone a very poor first impression of what on-device models are capable of, souring it for everyone for a long time afterwards.

I wonder what that will do for the competition between hosted genai and local models...

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