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.
framing 4 gb of data per user as 4 gb is even more of a stretch
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
#742If 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…
I believe webpages that use the API must request from the user via a system permissions dialogue to aces the prompt API, according the docs a few months ago.
It can only be called after the user has interacted with the page, but there's no dialogue from the browser
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/get-started#user-activa...
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
A spellchecker is a standard function of a text program. Since when is an AI part of the browser? On top it’s another abuse of their market domination. What if users prefer other models?
By that reasoning, any novel/cutting-edge addition to a browser or other software is wrong? Every standard was new at some point.
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Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#744Framing 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…
A spellchecker is a standard function of a text program. Since when is an AI part of the browser? On top it’s another abuse of their market domination. What if users prefer other models?
There was a point in time when a spellchecker was not a standard function of a text program, and a spellcheck dictionary would have been considered a large file to include with that kind of software.
I'm not a fan of Google's actions here, but I do think it's possible that at some future time we'll say, "but a local AI model is a standard function of a web browser."
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#745Rolled my eyes when this article got to the unlawful and climate parts. Rolled my eyes harder when I clicked to the homepage and saw what the main sell of this site is. I'd ask why this is so high on HN but it's so tailor-made for this audience I'm more disappointed than surprised.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#746Earlier 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...)
Shouldn't the filesystem be set to encrypt everything before it hits the physical storage layer?
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#747And that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes. Or Firefox of course.
Chromium on Linux already has Google's AI Mode in the omnibox and the new tab page, so I'm not sure Chromium would be immune to changes like local AI models.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#748Framing 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…
Hey if people could go for their pitchforks and torches over Apple giving them a free U2 album that ate up limited device storage space,
we have every right to be upset at Google's audacity to suddenly gobble up 4 fucking GB
Also from the same webiste, Claude installing spyware: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/
but discussion about that seems to have been suppressed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Anthropic+spyware
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#749Earlier 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…
> 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.
So what are you saying? Don't be mad over this becoming the norm, just shut up and sit down and accept it?
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#750OK, I rarely use Chrome (I like Safari and only ever open Chrome on the increasingly rare occasions when a site doesn’t work in Safari and lately it’s turned out that the site is just broken) but looking at the article and the comments here, I can’t figure out where this 4GB is supposed to be stored. None of the likely cases panned out when I looked.