Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

oztalking.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–69 of 69 posts

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

#61

Post by judge2020 »

imnes wrote: post #59

Serious question - why would Google need to ask user consent to push a new feature / update to Chrome? There's been a lot of new tech introduced through Chrome and eventually widely adopted and available everywhere. Without requiring user consent. QUIC + HTTP/3, WebP, Service Workers / PWAs, WASM, WebRTC, View Transitions API This feels like just another step of "make this new capability widely available so developer…

Main externality is that this will use 4gb and X megabytes/gigabytes of RAM on the billions of devices that use Chrome. If RAM and disk usage needs have gone up linearly in the past decade, this technically causes a momentary immediate jump in those needs, although people still probably would only adjust on their regular upgrade cadence, maybe slightly faster than normal.

*although this 4gb is probably very likely to go up even more, maybe 8, 16gb models - if the disk space is there, and the computer has the power to use bigger models, I don't see why Google wouldn't ship better more capable on-device models when possible (other than profit motive to push more non-local-ai requiring a Google One AI subscription).

*this idea works absent of the recent AI datacenter-based demand for NAND and DRAM. If anything consumers are avoiding buying NAND or DRAM right now due to the prices.

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

#62

Post by rvnx »

gumby271 wrote: post #54
rvnx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that the move is great, it's a very cool and nice stuff, just that it takes bandwidth and space without letting the user know. A solution: New AI features are available for use offline, they will make you able to translate offline, get answers, summaries, etc, would you like to download / install them (~4 GB)? It is going to fix the experience in the UI. It's a significant misstep by Google in its form…

> But saying "Google = bad, me uninstall Google, if you use Google Chrome you are an idiot" are not a productive feedback for a product owner there. I wasn't? I hope that wasn't directed at me since we seem to kind of agree otherwise. Unfortunately the vast majority of Chrome users wont understand that prompt. Google decided that the Chrome installer should be 4GB, that seems like a large web browser, but is it that…

No no, it wasn't against you, in fact I used your comment to piggy-back on "my"/our vision :)

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

#63

Post by scottyah »

expedition32 wrote: post #37
ghurtado wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not forced on people, get a grip. It's a free feature on a free browser, just like all the other features.

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

#65

Post by tantalor »

bri3d wrote: post #46
tantalor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> really needed a permissions dialog Why?

Users with data caps are an obvious reason, for example, see this frustrated user report here: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/415181794/chrome-al... . To your point about `fetch` in the sibling comment; yes, I would also be annoyed by a website which downloaded 4GB in the background without asking me, too. I don't think this is some moral outrage, to be clear; it's well within Google's rights, it doesn't se…

It doesn't make much sense to tie this to Chrome itself.

If an app or site uses too much bandwidth, it would be better to control this at the OS level, perhaps with a required user notification and consent. Or throttle certain apps.

It's common to set an alert for total data usage, which makes sense so you don't get surprised when you run out of data. That could be extended to watch the usage rate and alert by some threshold, or a projection on the total, like "hey at the current rate, you are going to hit your limit in N minutes".

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

#66

Post by seplox »

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've been using Firefox pretty much exclusively since its first release (I did a year or two on Opera about a decade ago), and I can't remember it failing to render any site at all. I do run across broken sites from time to time, but they always work once I dial back my extreme privacy settings.

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

#67

Post by elAhmo »

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.

What pages?
Post reply on HN