Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#31

Post by 404mm » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

comboy wrote: post #16

guilhermeasper wrote: post #6

IMO If you're into tech and still use Chrome*, that's on you. If you are not, you probably don't really care unless you need extra space on your PC. *Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.

Switched from firefox few months ago, I don't like google, but firefox has only few percent of market share currenly, many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), which simply make it unusable. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it. The overall browsers situation is less than ideal.

Technically speaking, Safari is the second most used browser. It’s quite surprising how often I get these “unsupported browser” popups. I still use it as my primary and have FF as a backup. No Chrome needed.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#32

Post by bri3d » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

sheept wrote: post #11

Any page can silently trigger an additional multi-gigabyte download for Chrome users by just calling this API: await LanguageModel.create() Since the model is installed once per browser, LanguageModel.availability() could probably also be used for fingerprinting.

Just the availability wouldn't be that bad from a fingerprinting standpoint (getting one bit that a majority of Chrome users have is just the same bits you already have, usually), except, it also exposes whether the underlying hardware is "eligible," and once it's running, you can also benchmark the language model performance. It's a mess. I think it might also be broken and work in iframes, which would be an even bigger mess; there are a few bug reports suggesting this although many of them look like slop.

This feature was massively bungled; I actually don't overall hate the idea of it (having a shared, pre-downloaded model that can run effectively from JS is kind of awesome versus sites downloading stuff into LocalStorage to use with hacked up wasm/webgl inference engines), but it really, really needed a permissions dialog and a proper anti-fingerprinting model.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#33

Post by ghurtado » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

DennisAleynikov wrote: post #17

intellectronica wrote: post #7

In their defense, it's an astonishingly good model for this size and you can use it for all sorts of cool stuff. Little demo of using this local model to inject AI into a page with a monkeyscript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s

yeah I'm lowkey pissed off people keep insulting google for giving them an offline version of coding enabled wikipedia that they get literally 0 data analytics from (just turn your wifi and ethernet off and use it offline after downloading it) what part of the 4Gb file offended people? the fact that ai runs on the edge reliably now?

[flagged]

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#34

Post by jackb4040 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

comboy wrote: post #16

guilhermeasper wrote: post #6

IMO If you're into tech and still use Chrome*, that's on you. If you are not, you probably don't really care unless you need extra space on your PC. *Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.

Switched from firefox few months ago, I don't like google, but firefox has only few percent of market share currenly, many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), which simply make it unusable. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it. The overall browsers situation is less than ideal.

I think it's a stretch to call firefox on mac "unusable". Like once a month I'll have something not work, and half the time it also doesn't work in chromium (both are the developer's fault). And when it does work in chromium, browsers are free so just switch over there and switch back. And to top it off, there are endless free flavors of chromium like brave etc, that virtually never have compatibility issues without needing to go full google.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#35

Post by kccqzy » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

haebom wrote: post #3

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #2

Story from May; Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964

So, Did Google respond?

Google’s PR team is so bad at managing their reputation that their response wouldn’t have mattered. Apple can download a 4GB Apple Intelligence model onto your phone (which likely has lower storage than your PC) without any controversy; Google cannot.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#36

Post by werdnapk » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

comboy wrote: post #16

guilhermeasper wrote: post #6

IMO If you're into tech and still use Chrome*, that's on you. If you are not, you probably don't really care unless you need extra space on your PC. *Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.

Switched from firefox few months ago, I don't like google, but firefox has only few percent of market share currenly, many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), which simply make it unusable. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it. The overall browsers situation is less than ideal.

I have been using Firefox for years (decades) and I rarely encounter a page or site that doesn't work... a handful perhaps, but it's a complete non-issue for me. If anything, my ad-blocker can sometimes cause issues and I'll disable that and everything is good again.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#37

Post by expedition32 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

ghurtado wrote: post #24

intellectronica wrote: post #7

In their defense, it's an astonishingly good model for this size and you can use it for all sorts of cool stuff. Little demo of using this local model to inject AI into a page with a monkeyscript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s

That does nothing to defend Google since the quality of the model is irrelevant to the accusation.

You'd think that if a technology is so good you don't need to force it on people.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#38

Post by ghurtado » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #8

This looks like AI-written blather, but it links to an article with useful information by someone who actually checked: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/fact-check-google-...

If you had bothered reading the article you would realize you only provided redundant information.

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#39

Post by tantalor » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

bri3d wrote: post #32

sheept wrote: post #11

Any page can silently trigger an additional multi-gigabyte download for Chrome users by just calling this API: await LanguageModel.create() Since the model is installed once per browser, LanguageModel.availability() could probably also be used for fingerprinting.

Just the availability wouldn't be that bad from a fingerprinting standpoint (getting one bit that a majority of Chrome users have is just the same bits you already have, usually), except, it also exposes whether the underlying hardware is "eligible," and once it's running, you can also benchmark the language model performance. It's a mess. I think it might also be broken and work in iframes, which would be an even bi…

> really needed a permissions dialog

Why?

Re: Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

#40

Post by satvikpendem » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:48 PM UTC

I personally use Firefox mainly due to extension support so I don't experience this. However, as a developer, the embedded Gemma local model in Chrome is vastly better to be included as a one time download than it is to download an AI model for every site you visit, as AI and especially local AI becomes increasingly more common. It is the same idea that Apple and Android and Windows have with their built-in foundation models in the OS. So in that case I can appreciate what Chrome is doing, as it will be saving a lot of bandwidth over time.

People have asked me what use cases this has, and I've been making little apps with on-device AI such as a calorie estimator and tracker for food, or a page summarizer or translated (the latter of which Firefox actually already has using a local model). Why pay for a cloud model when the user has a perfectly good model themselves?