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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

#751
post #747
post #35

And 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.

I'd expect them to be less cheerful about a 4GB bump than Google's team behind Chrome

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

#752
post #35

And that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes. Or Firefox of course.

Chromium doesn't support this API because it needs a binary blob to run the inference, although in theory it may still be configured to download the weights:

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

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

#753
post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bund…

It's not "becoming the norm." It's been the norm for decades. And yes, you should not be mad about the norm.

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

#754
post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bund…

The story is only trending because it’s an AI model and the internet is anti-ai right now. It’s a double standard.

It’s like how people are outraged that electricity is being used in data centers to power AI models. When you do the math, the power consumption is far, far less than all the other things you do all day without thinking twice. But again, anti-AI double standard

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

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bund…

It's not "becoming the norm." It's been the norm for decades. And yes, you should not be mad about the norm.

> And yes, you should not be mad about the norm.

Right and if slavery and virgin sacrifices happen for decades we should just join in

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

#757
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?

Because due to Google having a near-monopoly on the entire goddamn Internet, a shocking number of websites and services will refuse to work with non-chrome browsers.

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

#758

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…

Disagree. By your framing, might as well add a 4 Gb LLM to grep as an unasked for and downloaded option.

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

#759
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of rendering a web page needs Gemini?

What part of rendering a web page needs a local disk cache?

The part where you revisit or reload a site

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

#760

Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.

Sometimes I marvel at how nice it would be to have such a narrow view of the world and other's perspectives and contexts. Life would be so much easier!

Ironically, your comment seems to perfectly reflect the viewpoint you're criticizing.
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