141–150 of 157 posts
Still in origin trial? Looks like they're adding a temperature parameter: https://chromestatus.com/feature/6325545693478912
The parameters are not part of this initial release but can be added back with the origin trial you discovered.
Fwiw - I did a fairly large comparison of Gemini Nano (the in browser ai model) vs a comparable free hosted model of Gemma (from OpenRouter) and the hosted model absolutely trashed the local model on every aspect of speed, reliability, availability, etc. [1] I'm not particularly happy about that outcome as I wish we had more locally run AI models for reasons of privacy and efficiency, so this is more just a warning t…
Thanks for the write-up and the comparison, but more importantly for using the API in production!
You’re highlighting the "state of the art" gap we’re working to close. Cloud models will always have the advantage of massive parameter counts, but our bet is that for a huge class of simpler or high-volume tasks, the upsides of on-device (e.g. zero-cost, permission-less start with no quotas/infra, network-resilience, privacy) make it a compelling trade-off.
The models have been getting better at a rapid clip, and the team is heads-down on optimizing performance and reliability. To that end, we're always grateful for feedback. If you hit specific bugs, crashes, or quality regressions, filing a report with repro steps is the best way to help us improve. You can file those on crbug.com under the "Chromium > Blink > AI" component.
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…
Is it actually privacy preserving? Chrome mostly exists to extract all the information from a user it can without immediately getting a lawsuit of greater penalty than what is gained through ads, military contracts, etc. Android isn't too far off either. I would welcome any alternative to this. I can see applications for this being things like "while device is at rest and charging summarize all of the users recent te…
It’s a totally valid question, and transparency is the only way this can work. On-device processing is an important core design goal of these APIs.
There are NO logs of the input / output interactions sent to any server, not even for training purposes. The only metrics we have are on performance, stability, and other generic API usage signals like any other APIs. These are all controlled by existing user preferences in Chrome.
Not long before all of the web content will be going through these AI pipelines where user might not even see original webpage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's an interesting idea to explore. But... It's the type of idea that is unpredictable as it comes into contact with reality. If it works, it probably works very differently from the initial idea of how it will work.
Yeah, I 100% agree with the caution in this comment. I see the merit in such a proposal. It's the linguistic equivalent to boiling the food you consume, instead of eating it raw with all the associated bad stuff. The problem is, as you said, that this plan is unlikely to be as rosy as it's portrayed and probably has a lot of drawbacks in real life. Interesting to think about and explore, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the Soylent of written communication. Full nutritional value with an unremarkable flavor.
Are humans supposed to enjoy the "flavor" of diarrhea, as the result of giving every village idiot a microphone so they can spew shit from their mouths? Sure, you might say this sort of thing is boiling flavor out of your food, but... boiling the bacteria out of what you consume isn't a bad thing.
Even if the output is only shown to a human, imagine a comment in a thread that tricks an LLM into "summarizing" a false account where other innocent people said terrible ban-worthy things.
Who‘s gonna make it call tools?
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…
it's something I feel is finally viable to combat at zero cost to the user.
This plus webmcp would allow it to serve as a form of automod too on websites that you authenticate with (imagine a world where your social media profile has an automod of its own powered locally. can use this to steer your feed or to mute/block/moderate as needbe). Even without WebMCP I have been working on making it autodetect html elements and extract UGC (comments/threads..etc) automatically to moderate (since my initial tests with a small group found some websites with frequent UI changes would break if hardcoded or if they did a lot of AB testing)
Even better, the concept would allow you to also use it to hide certain spoilers (imagine sports or new movies that just came out and you want to not have to hide away from all socials).
didn't find any contacts on your new HN account, but in a few weeks will be able to reach out to you with it fleshed out. :)
We have a community of nearly 14k that we will distribute this to
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And what's being discussed here is what the better implementation of option 3 is.
My point is that if you're going with one of the possible implementations of option 3, then 22GB per browser is objectively a lot better than 22GB per website.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's an interesting idea to explore. But... It's the type of idea that is unpredictable as it comes into contact with reality. If it works, it probably works very differently from the initial idea of how it will work.
I 100% agree with this. I am certain that I cannot foresee how this would play out in reality.