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Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

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Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#51

Post by chrsw »

Holacc wrote: post #2

The local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.

I'm struggling to understand why anyone would think Google is doing this for user's privacy. I admit I haven't dug into what's going on here in detail, but my first reaction was Google is running a small model on the user's side because it's doing things that _can_ be done on the user side and they don't want to waste their own compute to do it on their server side. I'm pretty sure whatever this thing is doing, Google can easily beam up some small amount of data, have a model churn on it and spit back the result to the user's browser. But why do all that if you can just run some small inference on the user's device?

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#52

Post by windowsrookie »

apublicfrog wrote: post #48
goalieca wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.

Is that true? It feels wrong. Consumer grade SSDs and spinning disks are unlikely to be the products used in enterprise.

AI companies bought up all the NAND manufacturing capacity, limiting the available manufacturing capacity for consumer products. These data centers also use hard drives for some of their data storage.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#53

Post by superkuh »

hnlmorg wrote: post #28
superkuh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no debating the performance. Charge trap flash makes computing so much better. It's just a shame things went SSD only. It really isn't an exaggeration when it comes to actual storage space available per prebuilt.

I don’t know what pre-builts you’ve seen, but when I bought 2 middle-range laptops 5 years ago, all the models were between 500GB to 1TB of storage. And it’s not a trap when most people aren’t going to fill 5TB of storage with their accounts spreadsheets but they are going to notice the performance difference between an SSD and a HDD.

Yep. 500GB-1000GB is 2010 level of storage. And I in my experience they fill it up with photos and videos and then move onto unreliable, expensive, slow externals.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#54

Post by throw7 »

superkuh wrote: post #3

4GB should be nothing. It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

I've got a cheap chromebook I take when traveling with 32gb ssd... 4gb is a huge chunk of that. But it doesn't matter as it constantly complains to me about no space available.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#55

Post by datenyan »

seam_carver wrote: post #18

I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.

I would love to use Safari more, but unfortunately Facebook Messenger and similar ilk (maybe all messaging apps?) seems to be completely busted on it.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#56

Post by protocolture »

superkuh wrote: post #3

4GB should be nothing. It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

>It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster storage and everyone chose speed.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#57

Post by manquer »

rijavecb wrote: post #42
Weryj wrote: post #11

And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.

It's possible to get rid of it. Just delete the VM Bundle file(s) and add `"secureVmFeaturesEnabled": false` to your `claude_desktop_config.json`. You can find more info here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543#issue...

Doesn’t seem to work for windows ?.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#59

Post by Dylan16807 »

protocolture wrote: post #56
superkuh wrote: post #3

4GB should be nothing. It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

>It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data. Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster stora…

> Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster storage and everyone chose speed.

In 2014-2015, $100 would get you either 3TB of hard drive or 256GB of SSD.

In 2023-2024, $100 would get you 2TB of SSD. (For a few months even 3TB.)

So yeah everyone chose the speed option, but the speed option should have kept growing. Outside of bargain basement models 1-2TB should have become the minimum size.

Re: Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

#60

Post by seam_carver »

datenyan wrote: post #55
seam_carver wrote: post #18

I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.

I would love to use Safari more, but unfortunately Facebook Messenger and similar ilk (maybe all messaging apps?) seems to be completely busted on it.

messenger.com won't allow new sessions on any browsers afaik. https://www.facebook.com/messages works fine
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