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The Prompt API

developer.chrome.com

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Re: The Prompt API

#131

Post by Karrot_Kream »

haberman wrote: post #16

This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media. Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital. With an API like this, I assume you co…

I've thought about this for HN which, now that it's become so big, just has a lot of aggressive negativity and snark. You'd probably run into the same problem as Usenet Killfiles: the folks that use Killfiles would see random orphaned conversations or would just miss large parts of threads while the people that don't have Killfiles would see a mess of toxicity that would make them want to leave. Likewise if you prompt filter your experience, you'll be separating your experience from everyone else's.

Re: The Prompt API

#132

Post by 2ndorderthought »

gruez wrote: post #111
2ndorderthought wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot easier to hide the language they need in a EULA for a feature like this than it would be elsewhere. I appreciate you feel this is a cynical take. But have you seen the class action lawsuits against Google over the last 5 years? They exceed a billion dollars as far as I can remember and they are for more blatant things than this.

>It's a lot easier to hide the language they need in a EULA for a feature like this than it would be elsewhere. Why would adding a ML API or library require an EULA change?

So they don't get sued when the LLM inevitably instructs someone to drink bleach, hurt a stranger, delete the production db(I guess vibe coders say this is a good thing now though?), etc.

Re: The Prompt API

#133

Post by kimixa »

ljm wrote: post #125
haberman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is unironically exactly what I want from social media. I want the option to engage with the substance of new developments in the world, technology, etc. without the drama. I don't want to be drawn into the drama of strangers (who could, for all I know, just be bots or ragebaiting AIs). If I want drama, there's plenty of it on TV, or I could talk to my friends about what is going on with people I actually know. T…

I would really just like the quirkier internet of old. Flamewars these days are just created by shit-stirrers in another country who are just pumping out rage bait from an massive array of smartphones. It's not even an impassioned flamewar, it simply exists to aggravate. Using AI to forcefully disengage by simply suppressing that content would be nice and also have the secondary effect of depriving various internet r…

I'd argue the issue is people have figued out that "shit stirring" can make actual meaningful differences to reality, be they foreign or local.

When the limit of effect a flamewar would have is if Star Trek or Star Wars got the top billing, or Vim was recommended to new programmers instead of Emacs, it was a fun novelty.

But now there's real money and power resulting from this shit stirring of course people will use it as a means to an ends. They've optimised professional shit-stirring because it's so valuable now.

Re: The Prompt API

#135

Post by Cider9986 »

whatarethembits wrote: post #92
haberman wrote: post #16

This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media. Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital. With an API like this, I assume you co…

Kinda looking forward to something like this, as it has the potential to remove empty junk calories from the internet, hopefully leading to SIGNIFICANTLY less use of today's popular platforms. My wish list: - Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title. - For any given topic, I only care about the main article (with the option to only see a summary, unless its a high quality blog) a…

> - Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title.

DeArrow works for YouTube atleast. uBlock Origin or Brave browser works for ads. Not sure why you'd need an AI to remove ads...

Re: The Prompt API

#136

Post by halJordan »

paganel wrote: post #67
avaer wrote: post #4

It works, I've shipped this as a "local inference"/poor person's ollama for low-end llm tasks like search. The main win is that it's free and privacy preserving, and (mostly) transparent to users in that they don't have to do anything, which is great for giving non-technical users local inference without making them do scary native things. But keep in mind the actual experience for users is not great; the model downl…

> operating systems start reliably shipping their own prebaked models Here's to hoping that that dystopia will never happen.

Congratulations it already is here

Re: The Prompt API

#137

Post by 6thbit »

Is “Ship a 22gb model on your product” the new “put a chat window on your product”?

I agree with others this fits better in the OS, or hey maybe Apple sells a time-machine sort of NAS with neural engine chips.

Re: The Prompt API

#138

Post by fg137 »

jfoster wrote: post #115
fg137 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would very much like not to have to download 22 GB for some inference capability that is way worse than API calls both in terms of quality and speed. I would rather pay money than seeing this thing running in my browser that only prints 5 tps on high-end consumer hardware.

Why are you pretending those are the options? The options are: 1. 22GB per website 2. 22GB per browser 3. 0GB / No AI capabilities By having this in Chrome they are simply ensuring that option 2 replaces option 1. You still have option 3.

No. The real options are

1. No AI

2. AI that works and is actually useful

3. AI that is slow, crappy and hallucinates all the time

I choose 1 and 2.

Re: The Prompt API

#139

Post by kbx »

domenicd wrote: post #77
meander_water wrote: post #74

This looks like it uses Gemini Nano under the hood. But the latest Gemma4 E2B and E4B models appear to be much better, so you'd probably be better off deploying quantized versions through an extension for now. - Gemini Nano-1: 46% MMLU, 1.8B - Gemini Nano-2: 56% MMLU, 3.25B - Gemma4 E2B: 60.0% MMLU, 2.3B - Gemma4 E4B: 69.4% MMLU, 4.5B Sources: - https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-E2B-it - https://android-developer…

I no longer have any inside knowledge, but from my time on this team they were very quick about getting the latest small (Google) models into Chrome. I expect that if Gemma 4 (or its equivalent Gemini Nano) isn't already in Chrome, then it will be soon. Note that the article here was last updated 2025-09-21, and as of that time it was already on Gemini Nano 3.

[dead]

Re: The Prompt API

#140

Post by kbx »

haberman wrote: post #16

This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media. Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital. With an API like this, I assume you co…

Chrome PM for built-in AI APIs here.

I love this "de-snarkifier" idea and it seems to have broad interest. I couldn't resist hacking (well, vibe coding[1]) a "Snarknada" prototype to explore the viability, including patterns for low-latency and accuracy.

You’ve hit on exactly why we think on-device is the right move for this class of use cases. If you tried to "de-snark" an entire infinite-scrolling feed via a cloud API, the token costs would be astronomical for a developer. Plus, people (rightly) don't want to send their private social feeds or DMs to a third-party server just to clean up the tone.

Moving this to the device should make high-frequency "Semantic Mutation" financially and technically viable for the first time. If you (or anyone else) starts building this more seriously than my PM vibe coded toy, and hits specific friction points, I’d love to hear about them: it helps us prioritize the roadmap.

[1]: If you're using a coding agent (Cursor, Claude Code, etc.), I recommend pointing it to https://www.npmjs.com/package/built-in-ai-skills-md-agent-md. Most models were trained on the now-obsolete window.ai namespace, and this skill file helps them use the current APIs correctly.

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