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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

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Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#531

Post by pier25 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #255
toyg wrote: post #234

How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.

They don't want you to opt out. Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered" You're not even the customer when it comes to Google.

> Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered"

Or at least justify the hundreds of billions they are burning

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#532

Post by ranger_danger »

gempir wrote: post #120
ranger_danger wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please feel free to suggest a better alternative.

Helium has all the benefits of Chromium but none of the Google bloat or other crazy AI, Crypto, Gaming or whatever ideas other browsers ship. Just uBlock Origin pre-installed https://helium.computer/

There is also ungoogled-chromium:

https://ungoogled-software.github.io

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#535

Post by codethief »

scriptsmith wrote: post #31

If Chrome has the #optimization-guide-on-device-model and #prompt-api-for-gemini-nano flags enabled, either because it's part of some Origin Trial / Early Stable Release or something, then web pages will have access to the new Prompt API which allows any webpage to initiate the (one-time) download of the ~2.7 GiB CPU or ~4.0 GiB GPU model using LanguageModel.create() https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api Wh…

Next step: Invoke the prompt API from within online ads and run a "p2p" AI inference provider which forwards incoming LLM queries to website visitors. :-)

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#536

Post by postalrat »

bityard wrote: post #432
doginasuit wrote: post #278

"Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software. I don't use chrome for a long list of reasons but it is not standard or expected to get consent for that.

Are you okay with a 1 GB chrome install suddenly becoming a 5 GB chrome install on all your machines, without your permission or knowledge, for functionality you may or may not want?

Isn't that what it always has done after caching a few weeks of websites?

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#537

Post by SirFatty »

coldtea wrote: post #401
SirFatty wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at how many headlines indicated that something is silently happening. It's a weird trend at the moment.

No weird: accurate. It IS a silent install. I wanted a browser, not an LLM.

Completely missing the point.

https://share.google/aimode/WOJL4sf0GK2Vyi6kA

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#538

Post by liminis »

z3t4 wrote: post #463
dist-epoch wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is why I use paid-for OSes and browsers, instead of free ones like Linux or Firefox. I don't want to be the product.

Why is nobody building a paid for browser with built in search engine and LLM assistant? Should probably make it open source for transparency. And before anyone says you would build/compile it yourself if it was open source, those ppl are already running their self compiled tools and are not the target market.

Isn't that essentially Dia? (Pro is 20USD/month.) https://www.diabrowser.com/

(I miss Arc, such a shame it only gets security/chromium updates now ...)

And I think Codex's desktop client has a built-in browser now? At least I've seen someone using something like that. Nevermind Atlas is a thing now too. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

(Tell me if I'm misunderstanding you?)

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#539

Post by CobrastanJorji »

doginasuit wrote: post #278

"Silently installs" is misleading. They are including a file in the package which is presumably related to the functionality of the software. I don't use chrome for a long list of reasons but it is not standard or expected to get consent for that.

100%. "Researchers Discover Chrome Uses Your Hard Drive to Silently Make a Copy of Everything you Look At Online" is ominous and scary and also an accurate description of how caches work. There's enough scary and bad AI stuff to discuss without needing to use scare tactics.

Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

#540

Post by liminis »

TheServitor wrote: post #23

Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.

I mean, with the price of SSDs lately, 4GB is not a completely negligible addition.
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