Another reason to switch to Firefox.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
721–730 of 1001 posts
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#722An extra 4GB per user on our NFS home file server is going to be a huge pain (several thousand students). And for our Windows lab machines, they end up in AppData\Local (which isn’t redirected for operational reasons) so we either leave the profiles in place and let them accumulate (suboptimal) or clear out the profiles as we normally do and let it redownload, over and over again. As much as I’m against unexpected 4G…
Fellow sysadmin here. I'm glad to see somebody else thinking about the practical side of this. Google should know better. Chrome has local administrator permissions anyway (w/ its updater) so they should have installed a single copy for the entire machine. It's not cool to give a damn about the people who keep mundane stuff like desktop infrastructure, file servers, etc, working, I guess. The wanton disregard to even…
Google has not ever cared about the real world implications of their browser decisions in the past. I can't say I'm surprised that they didn't start caring for this occasion.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
A spellchecker is a standard function of a text program. Since when is an AI part of the browser? On top it’s another abuse of their market domination. What if users prefer other models?
By that reasoning, any novel/cutting-edge addition to a browser or other software is wrong? Every standard was new at some point.
I am against built-in VPN for the same reason I am against this. There is nothing novel or cutting edge about them. Any browser could have done it back in 2003, but they didn't do it for a reason.
Of course, it's not like any of this matters in the end.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#724Why use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
because it's really well developed and Just Works
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#725[deleted]
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is a far cry from 4 GiB Equating a 4GB file installed without explicit consent to the installation of a language dictionary is comical. That's like saying an unwanted political mailer left in your mailbox is the equivalent of a pallette of hammers left in your driveway.
It sounds like you have a specific number of GB in mind that an app can take up, below which it's totally their business, and above which they need to plead their case, disclose the purpose, and allow me to choose. What's that number? How did you arrive at it and why? My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows. Is this below or your line, or are they actually in trouble as soon as they're extracte…
My arbitrary limit is "not 5x from when I installed it". Like if my gallon milk jug was suddenly 36 inches tall.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#727Framing this as needing "consent" is deeply misguided. It's as silly as claiming that Microsoft Word installed an English language spellcheck dictionary without your consent. It's just part of the software. You consented to installing the software and having it autoupdate. That covers it. Now we can argue whether or not it's an appropriate amount of disk space or bandwidth to use, but that's just a reasonable practic…
If someone puts a camera and a microphone on devices that don't need them, then it's a) pushing up the price of goods for everyone with features that mainly serve corporate, b) there are bad actors out there even if you think corporate is a good one, c) no reason to think corporate is a good actor. Shipping an AI model with a browser is starting to look like sticking cameras on ALL glasses, not just smart glasses, re…
Shipping the model with the browser is exactly the opposite of what you are claiming.
The alternative is sending the data to Google.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#728Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most users aren't even going to know that this is here. Web developers will expose this capability to the user. The devs will have to determine if the model is delivering what they need. It's good to have something to work with if these Web APIs are going to be part of a standard. I suppose this means that ALL the browser vendors are likely to implement something
> I suppose this means that ALL the browser vendors are likely to implement something Mozilla has taken a strong stand against the prompt api.
Mozilla classically has taken a very strong stand against ever holding true to their values so we'll probably get one from them in a few months.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you have a specific number of GB in mind that an app can take up, below which it's totally their business, and above which they need to plead their case, disclose the purpose, and allow me to choose. What's that number? How did you arrive at it and why? My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows. Is this below or your line, or are they actually in trouble as soon as they're extracte…
My arbitrary limit is "not 5x from when I installed it". Like if my gallon milk jug was suddenly 36 inches tall.
Skinny milk jug.
Re: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
#730What’s wrong with shipping a local llm? This is quite nice IMO is there a privacy concern with running it locally? I already have a few games I wrote web based using this and it’s quiet nice to not need a server to run my game in pure HTML from my file system