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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
- cubefox 5mo agoI thought using local rather than cloud AI was pretty universally agreed to be good?
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoThe universally agreed upon good is leaving the choice to use AI or not to the end user.
- zekrioca 5mo agoExcept these weights are barely used. Read the article.
- cubefox 5mo agoThanks for reminding, it was a moment of weakness. Here is the relevant quote: > the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus
- pjc50 5mo agoThere is a secret, third option.
- cubefox 5mo agohttps://c.tenor.com/odyVsZbC-OYAAAAC/tenor.gif https://c.tenor.com/odyVsZbC-OYAAAAC/tenor.gif
- PufPufPuf 5mo agoIf only there was an orange canine coming to help us
- Markoff 5mo ago...or some Italian composer
- drcongo 5mo agoI can't read the article (503) but does anyone know why someone calling themselves thatprivacyguy is installing Google Chrome?
- a96 5mo agoMaybe in order to document a privacy problem with it that they heard about.
- Animats 5mo agoDoes Chromium do this?
- lena_vibe 5mo ago[flagged]
- ponyous 5mo agoThe site is currently unavailable 503 so I can't read it. But I wonder, what should you consent to? Every dependency? Every dependency above 1GB?
- nottorp 5mo agoExtra power and ram usage without your permission, for example.
- whizzter 5mo agoExactly, for all the hate of Windows, I could at least just look for shit named co-pilot and uninstall it for a pretty nice experience on my new computer. Phones aren't always as straightforward (especially jarring as "Google services" are required in Sweden on Android for stuff like mobile identity systems).
- StingyJelly 5mo agoThis is so absurd... I have to keep an old (rooted in order to hide that adb is enabled) phone connected to my home server just to use such app, because grapheneos without google services is apparently not secure enough.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- KeplerBoy 5mo agoThat ship has sailed on the web a long time ago.
- trvz 5mo agoRead the article, it's not about that, but a mere 4GB of storage.
- nottorp 5mo agoOh and why is it there? Do you really think it's not loaded and executed automatically by default, so some Google executive can justify their "AI" spend?
- tdeck 5mo agoSomebody's promotion packet depended on pushing this through the approval process.
- jacquesm 5mo agoNot on my devices. Auto update has been abused so often now that it is an embarrassment to the industry. Auto update should be for bug fixes and security issues only.
- fsflover 5mo agoThis is exactly how it works on Debian. Can recommend.
- jacquesm 5mo agoGuess what runs my PC. Tech companies just don't understand consent.
- bell-cot 5mo ago> ... don't understand consent. The word you're looking for is "respect". They understand consent, the same as JBS* understands animal rights. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V.
- delecti 5mo agoFor anyone else wondering why that link doesn't work, the hacker news formatting is dropping the final period. Add it back in and the link works.
- dspillett 5mo agoIt is almost the standard: Q: Does <company> understand consent? A: No / Maybe Later but the Google version is: Q: Does <company> understand consent? A: No / Maybe Later / we did it anyway, you'll need to search to find out how to turn it off, maybe ask the new AI model we've just back-door installed?
- Waterluvian 5mo agoI think they do. They just don’t care. We’re the fleetingly small percentage of nerds in the corner who will notice and complain. Were useful to them for other reasons but we’re not really the concern here. It’s probably a business misplay to tell the other 99% of users about something they weren’t going to think about. But if by chance it goes awry and there’s outcry, just apologize and commit to do better.
- dotcoma 5mo agoWhy use a browser from Google or Microsoft in 2026? Why in the world?
- TrackerFF 5mo agoEasy. You work for a company that has only whitelisted chrome or edge.
- bpye 5mo agoNothing says you have to use the same browser at work and outside of work? I use Edge for work, Firefox everywhere else.
- thyristan 5mo agoI agree. This is Google doing underhanded Google-things. Why the hell would anyone trust them in the first place?
- liminis 5mo agoGoogle's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".
- account42 5mo agoYou have to understand it to work like in many RPG games - you get to murder and pillage from time to time as long as you donate some of your ill gotten gains to move your alignment back to "neutral".
- sevenzero 5mo agoWhat browsers would you recommend? I use Brave but it's still Chromium under the hood. It's the only one that I never had trouble with adblock though. Also lets me play youtube on mobile when my screen is locked.
- DineshKruplani 5mo agoit's so absurd at this point. isn't chrome already so much abused.
- flanked-evergl 5mo agoThis is a bit disingenuous. If you install Chrome, you install Chrome and all it's parts. They don't ask your consent for individual parts because that would be absurd. If you don't want Chrome and all its parts, don't use it.
- SwellJoe 5mo agoChrome is the default browser on Android.
- yoz-y 5mo agoOne would imagine that the model could be shared on Android and not be part of chrome. Maybe this way it’s simpler or is compatible with regulations.
- mft_ 5mo agoIf I install Chrome, I expect it to take a few hundred MBs and then only take up additional space in a controlled and transparent manner - for its cache, for example. For me, secretly adding 4GB after installation is a bit too much. If you're okay with 4GB being added, where would you draw a line? What if it downloaded a 40GB file? 400GB?
- flanked-evergl 5mo agoPersonally I draw the line where Chrome becomes worse than alternatives, and then I switch. Lately Firefox has been getting better, but I still prefer Chrome for almost all my needs, so I stick to it. This barely even makes a difference to me. If it was 400GB however it would make a difference to me, and I would make more of an effort to switch to something else.
- Markoff 5mo agoI fail to see scenario where Chrome is better than almost any Chromium alternative with exemption of Google account sync.
- TheServitor 5mo agoFraming 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.
- perks_12 5mo agoThe next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)
- ekianjo 5mo agoNetflix does not store 4gb on your drive...
- a96 5mo agoIt does if it triggers this download.
- dathinab 5mo agoand people on very limited bandwidth and/or speed don't watch Netflix (or do so at most at 1080p) and if they watch netflix they are fine with clogging up their internet as it isn't some random backround download hindering what they want to do but what they are actively doing
- tthu1 5mo agoWhat is a lot of traffic to you? 2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic. I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.
- jve 5mo ago> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push. Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms. > For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered. THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents. However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
- PatronBernard 5mo ago> Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms. Why not? It's about 60 000 London - New York City flights by the way (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/jul/19/carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...). And what's the benefit again?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- SwellJoe 5mo agoI know it takes extra steps to make Android perform OS or app updates over LTE. I doubt it's downloading a 4GB model over LTE unless the user has chosen to perform updates over LTE.
- pu_pe 5mo agoSome parts of the anti-AI movement are becoming so unhinged that now any use of compute is considered an environmental threat. This degrowth mentality needs to die.
- pezgrande 5mo agoIf anything I am glad a bit of shift to local llm's. Their gemma4 is pretty powerful for such small model so I guess that's what they are delivering.
- jbub 5mo agohttps://archive.ph/vhTfm https://archive.ph/vhTfm
- walletdrainer 5mo ago> Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered. This is satire, obviously.
- mschuster91 5mo agoClearly, you've never lived in Germany or other places that still have data caps and slow and unreliable internet connections. Yes, 4GB of unintended traffic can absolutely wreck someone's finances.
- Ekaros 5mo agoOr places with collateral damage due to failures of German ISPs and state... That is many other parts of Europe while roaming... 4GB is significant cut of the roaming data allocated...
- Bender 5mo agoSome time ago friends were pranking each other with 32GB favicon.ico files this was a thing and one of them was on mobile in Germany. Turns out it would keep downloading in the background even if leaving the page. Their account was locked and had a massive bill for roaming charges. That prank went horribly wrong.
- flossly 5mo agoAnd that's why we have, promote, and (hopefully) all use Chromium on our Linuxes. Or Firefox of course.
- cube00 5mo agoChromium on Linux already has Google's AI Mode in the omnibox and the new tab page, so I'm not sure Chromium would be immune to changes like local AI models.
- flossly 5mo agoI'd expect them to be less cheerful about a 4GB bump than Google's team behind Chrome
- scriptsmith 5mo agoChromium doesn't support this API because it needs a binary blob to run the inference, although in theory it may still be configured to download the weights: https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-the-api https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...
- scriptsmith 5mo agoIf 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 https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api When Chrome 148 releases tomorrow, this will be the default behaviour on desktop. To download, it should check for 22 GiB free disk space on the volume where your Chrome data dir is, and at least double the model size of free space in your tmp dir.
- tobylane 5mo agoThose two (and more) exist in chrome://flags in Chrome 147. I'm disabling them now, with the expectation that will prevent the new default. One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?
- scriptsmith 5mo agoThose flags will exist already, but will default to enabled in 148. That other flag is for using a different open-source inference engine to the (from what I can tell) closed-source one that's used by default.
- RaiausderDose 5mo agoI'm on Chrome 147 too and disabled: "optimization-guide-on-device-model" - Enables optimization guide on device "prompt-api-for-gemini-nano" - Prompt API for Gemini Nano - Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input and deleted weights.bin and the 2025.x folder in "OptGuideOnDeviceModel" Will report if Chrome 148 downloads the model again.
- phs318u 5mo agoIf you touch those files into existence and chown to root and chmod to 0, it shouldn’t be able to ever overwrite them right?
- lobito25 5mo agoAnyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.
- a96 5mo agoFor many, it's also involuntarily installed (e.g. corporate, vendor etc).
- ainiriand 5mo agoSometimes I marvel at how nice it would be to have such a narrow view of the world and other's perspectives and contexts. Life would be so much easier!
- lobito25 5mo agoIronically, your comment seems to perfectly reflect the viewpoint you're criticizing.
- ainiriand 5mo agoIn my humble opinion, the parent of my comment seems to paint a picture that is quite drastic. I see why many people would have Chrome installed and I do not think something like that should be impose on to anyone.
- Hamuko 5mo agoThis has to be some kind of a limited rollout, since none of my machines have this AI model installed even when Chrome is updated to the latest version. No indication that anything is being downloaded, since after updating to the latest version of Chrome on this machine, I'm seeing <100 kB/s download speeds for the entire system.
- elashri 5mo ago[flagged]
- imcritic 5mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 5mo agoWe've banned this account.
- imcritic 5mo ago[dead]
- elashri 5mo agoHi Tom, since you are here. It seems that my comment, the GOP is flagged and I think this is a case of flag abuse. Can you help with that?
- tomhow 5mo agoThat was an unsubstantive comment, that started a generic tangent, and veers onto the wrong side of these parts of the guidelines: Don't be snarky. Converse curiously Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. I understand you probably didn't know that or may not accept the assessment, and that's fine, but please know that we consider it important that comments should be about the article's primary topic and that they activate curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- elashri 5mo agoThanks for explaining that, you are probably right.
- tzury 5mo agoWell, npm install … did worse
- toyg 5mo agothat's a willing act - you are actively asking npm to download something, and accepting it might be terrible for you. Here chrome is just installing things behind your back, whether you really want it or not.
- yearolinuxdsktp 5mo agoNever use “npm install”, only “npm ci”. Using “npm install” is a willing act to run fresh exploits.
- nsonha 5mo agoit also installs an entire remote desktop stack on your computer without consent, and video codecs, and pdf reader... what is new here?
- apexalpha 5mo agoI feel this is great in combination with an agent like OpenClaw or Hermes.
- peterjmag 5mo agoLooks like the site's struggling to keep up with the traffic. A couple mirror links: https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp... https://archive.ph/sM7O5 https://archive.ph/sM7O5 (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)
- semiquaver 5mo agoOh dear! Imagine all the carbon the many requests this server are using! Hoisted by their own petard…
- simianwords 5mo agoSorry but the whole climate angle on this is extremely stupid and needs to be challenged. I have noticed this new phenomenon of people using climate as a trump card to oppose any thing they don’t like. The thing about these kind of arguments is that any economic activity or any sort of action involves some load on climate. The magnitudes are important. In this case: a single hamburger does the same amount of emissions as 50 such downloads. What’s really the point of this kind of virtue signalling?
- potatototoo99 5mo agoThere is consumer demand for hamburgers. There is no consumer demand for AI, hence how egregious that it also comes with negative externalities.
- newtonsmethod 5mo agoI have to tell you something: there is consumer demand for AI.
- pjc50 5mo agoWe'll never know, since companies seem determined to make it non-optional.
- shmeeed 5mo agoI for one would love to see someone try and shove hamburgers down everybody's throats in order to increase consumer demand.
- stalfosknight 5mo agoThis is a very good way to put it. AI is being pushed so hard from the top down by every executive (who have been practically foaming at the mouth about AI for years now) it might as well be extruding from every port and seam on people's devices as if it were a buzzword/fomo diarrhea of some sort.
- 5mo ago
- sigmoid10 5mo agoOne upside to this is that it doesn't use Gemma and instead uses Gemini. So at least for Gemini Nano (apparently called XS internally by Google) it means that the weights are now de facto open and you no longer need a current Android phone to get the latest and best model in this class. This also makes it the only open American frontier-level model right now.
- HumanOstrich 5mo agoCan you provide any sources for that? I'd like to learn more about this open frontier model.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoSources for what? The pareto frontier of LLMs? How Google is pretty much on the line with most of their LLM products? Or this particular model? For the first two you need to look for size/cost vs. accuracy charts. There are tons of them floating around. For the latter there is not much official info except what you can infer by analyzing the weights.bin file that Chrome downloads. But it does mention Gemini in there, so it seems pretty obvious that it is from their proprietary line of models.
- HumanOstrich 5mo agoSources for your claim that the model being downloaded to Android/Chrome is Gemini instead of Gemma. Other than downloading the bin file myself and analyzing it lol.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoHow about Google itself? https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api >With the Prompt API, you can send natural language requests to Gemini Nano in the browser.
- deleted 5mo ago
- dwedge 5mo agoMan the longer all this crap goes on the more I realise Stallman was right
- k12sosse 5mo agoEating the toenails is sort of like drinking the Koolade but for privacy
- franze 5mo ago[dead]
- peterspath 5mo agoGood time to try Orion! https://orionbrowser.com https://orionbrowser.com
- zihotki 5mo agoBetter not, it's too buggy and sluggish, it's more in a beta stage on desktop. I've been using it for the last year but not anymore.
- raverbashing 5mo ago[flagged]
- zekrioca 5mo agoYou should have finished reading the article. Stop being lazy and binary-minded.
- farfatched 5mo agoIf only Chrome had deferred implementing delta updates back in 2009 (?), they could have introduced it along with this to make it a net zero change!
- kotaKat 5mo agoWhy the hell can't this just be an extension in the first place? Why does it have to be bolted in by default? Why does Google and by extension its employees have this constant need to assault and violate me with this garbage?
- GaryBluto 5mo ago[flagged]
- nl 5mo agoI think this is a bad framing. Javascript running on a page can use a feature that requires a model to be downloaded. I have pages that use it, or other LLM models via LiteRT or HuggingFace transformers.js. I try to warn the user, but that is my responsibility as a page author. I like that this is enabling the web platform to remain competitive. The author is pulling a long bow by trying to claim this is some GDPR violation. Have they ever used the web? There are inefficient sites everywhere, with autoplaying video etc. 4GB isn't nothing, but if a page wants to use it then hopefully it is useful to the user!
- tim-projects 5mo agoI use brave. Firefox doesn't work in my qemu VM with (none pass through) hardware acceleration, it just crashes the VM. Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.
- LelouBil 5mo agoIf you're not aware already, there's also Brave origin: https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/38561489788173-What-is-Brave-Origin https://support.brave.app/hc/en-us/articles/38561489788173-W... A lighter Brave.
- kushalpatil07 5mo agoI was working on on-device AI for 3 years. This was the prime idea we were exploring, how can someone undercut the OS providers and ship an LLM that other apps can also use on-device. Like if meta decides to do this, it can serve an API to all mobile app companies for an on-device LLM long before the OS is there. This is Google's way of reaching LLM distribution on laptops, since they don't have their own
- bartread 5mo agoOn one level, I can't figure out how bent out of shape to get over this (but read on). Software I use downloads updates all the time, adds new features all the time, and I mostly don't ask for any of it. So if you see this as just a new feature that provides some on-device AI, it's a bit, so what? A new feature? The last GT7 or Flight Sim patch was bigger than this, what's the big deal, etc. However, that's not really what's going on. It theory Chrome gives you a local LLM that can provide local AI powered features. In practice, everything gets sent to the cloud anyway so the local LLM seems mostly to exist as a disguise for that, which is shady AF. As others have pointed out, the solution is https://www.firefox.com/ https://www.firefox.com/. And whilst it's been trendy on HN for several years to slag off Firefox and Mozilla, I went back to Firefox as my daily driver several years ago, and Chrome's high-handed enforcement of Manifest V3 extensions (meaning no full fat uBlock Origin) has only served to cement that decision. It's mostly been great. The only downside is that some sites don't work properly on Firefox, and I'm 99.999% sure that's not Firefox's fault. For example, Paypal's post-login verification step breaks so every time I want to buy something using Paypal I have to switch to Chrome. And, no, disabling uBlock Origin and other extensions on Paypal doesn't help - I've done this already. Seriously, Paypal, it's been months: will you please just fix signing in and paying on Firefox, please? And many sites will assume you're a bot first and ask questions later if you hit them with anything other than Chrome or Safari... which is also extremely lame and scummy.
- projektfu 5mo agoWeird, I access PayPal through FF all the time. It's probably one of those weird geographical differences or something. One thing I did see is that at least one site (AliExpress) doesn't initiate the redirect after the payment, but still accepted the payment.
- degrees57 5mo agoI have the PayPal on Firefox problem. Once I see it, I just give up and use a credit card instead.
- mat_epice 5mo agoI don't think that adding the feature is the issue here, but instead Google deciding it needs to push an order of magnitude more data and store it on your device. I can understand wanting to at least re-evaluate your use of a tool when that happens. If you were to install Chrome fresh, what if it was a 4GB+ download from their website? I would at least pause. For reference, a regular offline installer is 140MB.
- shevy-java 5mo agoGoogle abuses users. You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.
- skeledrew 5mo agoSo typical. Just imagining the consequences for someone with chronically low disk space, like me. Luckily I'm a Firefox person, though I use Vivaldi now and then.
- protocolture 5mo ago>Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. Oh my god thats terrible I hope you continue this article in this mode and dont pivot to some unsubstantiated bs claim that makes absolutely no sense... >At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. sigh. Imagine if everyone on the planet start using a memory hogging, cpu chugging browser application what a terrible hazard that would be for the climate. Oh and it might have an AI component in it. This claim is worse than the AI in data centers boiling the earth claims. We can measure carbon released down to the watt. If you have an issue with people using power, shut up and talk to your government about carbon taxation/moving to alternative power sources. trying to shame some power users, quite arbitrarily isn't just senseless its self defeating. Its a measurement problem, the second people start getting shaky measurements of what their neighbors are doing, they start trying to shift the blame.
- toyg 5mo agoHow 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.
- wolvoleo 5mo agoThey 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.
- data-ottawa 5mo agoI was not happy when they added Gemini to the top bar, in its own place that nothing else gets to use.
- sidewndr46 5mo agoDon't forget the metric saying "99.97% of user have installed this" even though less than 1% of users know it exists, much less use it
- zamadatix 5mo agoOr "25% of users have used this in the last month" when it's made so easy to accidentally trigger it that the real usage is a few % at most.
- sidewndr46 5mo agoit could easily be "after we replaced an existing UI element with a button to launch this instead, adoption increased 9001% month over month"
- lkramer 5mo agoat this point you're barely the product either. You're more a passive platform for them to execute their strategy on.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jbverschoor 5mo agoAnd that will be 4GB per chrome instance I assume? (not profiles, instances) And what happens with each electron app if it uses chrome? languagemodel should be an OS service..
- kgeist 5mo agoElectron uses Chromium and nothing prevents them from disabling it, if it ever ends up there.
- ulfw 5mo agoI can't for the life of me understand how this browser has become the world's most used. It's literally from an ad company.
- derangedHorse 5mo agoDoes anyone else find the writing in the article to be overdramatic? Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices. To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 *tabs* open that nearly take up 4gb. The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion. > The roughly 4 GB × N devices of disk-storage cost, sustained, on user hardware. SSDs have a per-GB embodied carbon cost of approximately 0.16 kg CO2e per GB of NAND manufactured [18] The estimated environmental aspect of the download also seems like an overblown point, noted for sensationalism. There are always hand-wavy numbers involved and I had to look no further than the quote above to find evidence of this. The reference for [18], "The dirty secret of SSDs: embodied carbon", incorrectly links to "Toward Carbon-Aware Networking" and makes no mention of the environmental cost of SSDs. After looking up "The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon" myself, I was able to see the same methodologies as I was expecting used [1]. > We conducted an analysis encompassing 94 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reports, which collectively quantify the embodied cost of SSDs. Owing to the scarcity of direct and up-to-date LCA studies focused specifically on SSDs. We compiled a dataset comprising LCA reports pertaining to Server, Workstation, Desktop, Laptop, and Chromebook products, all of which feature SSDs All these studies rely on metrics extrapolated from layered assumptions and end up being used by those who try to use them as objective numbers. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793 https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.10793
- Zekio 5mo ago4gb isn't really a negligible amount, given the amount of desktops and laptops sold with just a 256gb ssd
- Aachen 5mo agoExactly. Nand is expensive. I upgraded what my laptop came with but after installing a few games, cloning repositories over the years, various projects I've done, and other regular use, it's perpetually full. 4GB is probably about half the space I have free at any given time Which apparently means it'll never install btw, even if I were to run Chrome. Another comment said they check for 22GB free space
- doginasuit 5mo ago"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.
- SirFatty 5mo agoLook at how many headlines indicated that something is silently happening. It's a weird trend at the moment.
- vanderZwan 5mo agoWe live in a tech world where it has become normalized that perfectly functioning software that you used to buy once and then got to use indefinitely suddenly receives an "update" to put previously existing functionality behind a pain subscription. The reasonable expectation people have is that an update fixes security bugs and maybe includes a few optimizations. So no, I don't think it's a weird trend at all that people start describing software as "silently" doing things when trust in automatic updates of software (a thing that software silently does) has deservedly gone down the drain in the last few years.
- chrisjj 5mo agoIts a salesman's foot in the door, except its near-invisible and gets to walk round your house.
- WarmWash 5mo agoIf it gets the clicks it sticks.
- coldtea 5mo agoNo weird: accurate. It IS a silent install. I wanted a browser, not an LLM.
- SirFatty 5mo ago
- kasabali 5mo ago> The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration into the user's installs of products B, C, D, E, F, G, H without asking. Reach across vendor trust boundaries. No consent dialog. No opt-out UI. Re-installs itself if the user removes it manually, every time Claude Desktop is launched. God, I'm SICK of this AI slop style. After ingesting terabytes of pirated books you'd expect a little bit more variety in it's writing.
- kgeist 5mo agoLike 2/3 posts on HN now have this "No X. No Y. No Z." pattern. It's one of strong signals for me that the author didn't bother and just copy pasted their LLM's output as is. And the LLM mostly likely was pointed at some other resource to write the article, and I'd rather read the original. I think HN needs a policy to replace AI slop articles with the original articles/announcements etc. once detected, and technically the guidelines already cover it: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." >After ingesting terabytes of pirated books you'd expect a little bit more variety in it's writing. I think it's the result of post-training. The original base model most likely had a less slopy style. This style is what AI companies think is a good style (they specifically train for it).
- TH3F4llen1 5mo agoThat's crazy just another reason I've been degoogling my phone.
- ben_w 5mo ago> Energy intensity of network data transfer: 0.06 kWh per GB, the mid-band of Pärssinen et al. (2018) "Environmental impact assessment of online advertising", Science of The Total Environment [14]. The paper reports a 0.04-0.10 kWh/GB range depending on the share of fixed-line vs mobile transfer and inclusion of end-user device energy. 0.06 is a defensible mid-point. 2018? An estimate from 8 years ago is going to be off by a factor of 10 or so. Not sure you'd get far with the legal arguments unless you're actually a lawyer. Too easy to misunderstand the jargon (i.e. the same reason why it's dangerous to use an LLM as your lawyer). (As an aside, the whole thing reads to me like the style LLMs use; not saying for sure it was, just giving me those vibes).
- Schiendelman 5mo agoYou think the energy cost to transfer has dropped by 10 X in eight years? Why?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5mo agoSeems reasonable to believe to me. The cost of a transfer is presumably calculated based on the base power cost of the transfer machinery, since I really doubt that a router or switch's power usage is linear with the amount of data it's transferring. The amount that an industrial router or switch (which is what 80-90% of the hops between you and Google are) has to have increased its bandwidth by around 10x over that time, and I doubt they have 10x'd their energy usage.
- ben_w 5mo agoLong term historical trend, lots of small tech improvements that add up, like all other tech. Some of it's how antennas are higher gain, which puts more of the energy in the path from one end of a line to the other and wasting less (affecting both cellular and WiFi standards over this period), some is improved compute reducing the cost of routing, but as with the improvements to chips and batteries and PV, the list of things is long and each one only contributes part of it. EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.
- kshmir 5mo agoBesides the numbers being stupidly overblown, this post shows why Europe is in a unstoppable death spiral.
- chris_explicare 5mo ago[flagged]
- semiquaver 5mo ago[flagged]
- mat_epice 5mo agoSounds like you've jumped to conclusions without reading the whole thing, or are making a disingenuous connection between two very different concepts. Climate impacts (really just energy waste) and "legal" arguments are different parts of this article. The legal part centers around whether they have permission to install this model along with Chrome, and whether they are using deceptive practices related to the model. "Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC (the ePrivacy Directive) prohibits the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user, without the user's prior, freely-given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent, except where strictly necessary for the provision of an information-society service explicitly requested by the user..." That is not about climate. The article goes on to say that there would not be a legal issue if Google simply asked, documented, not taken initial action without user approval, allow deletion, etc. Also not about climate. What they do imply is that Google's being dishonest if they say that they are carbon neutral (as is often said in their Environmental, Social, and Governance reports) while imposing up to 250 GWh of power use on network providers and end users. I can see the concern.
- graynk 5mo agoWhile I find the issue at hand extremely annoying and in poor taste (and this is not news - this was known in advance) - the same applies to the blog. This annoying clickbaity SEO slop of a blog seems to exist only to advertise their consultation services.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- kittikitti 5mo agoThis is egregious and the only people who can get away with it are these Big Tech companies. The legal analysis is moot. They have operated with impunity for decades. The law, especially with AI, only applies to organizations that Big Tech and the government want to eliminate. Rules for thee, not for me.
- mark_l_watson 5mo agoI am trying to wrap my head around this: if I remove Chrome Browser, will I reclaim the disk space for this model? Thanks in advance.
- RandyOrion 5mo agoLike the recent copilot silent signing incident, the without consent part is blatant foul move. If you don't like be treated like anything but human, you should seriously consider replacing chrome with ungoogled chromium or other browsers.
- coldtea 5mo agoTime to switch.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dmarinus 5mo agoI think this policy will disable the automatic download of the model: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/#GenAILocalFoundati... The prompt API can be tested here: https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/prompt-api-playground/ https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/prompt-api-playground/ It would be really helpful if there was a way to download the model to a central location, so multiple users on a single system could easily share it.
- midtake 5mo agoBotnet browser does botnet things, not surprised.
- alex1138 5mo agoGoogle/Alphabet is a big company On the one hand, Waymo seems to have a better safety record than Tesla does. That's not nothing. For someone nominally in charge of SpaceX like Elon is, it's a red flag On the other, Google does things like this with Chrome, and also they arguably censor. It's irritating
- jll29 5mo agoWait for Ladybug to come out, it'll bury all the company-controlled browsers.
- MrDrMcCoy 5mo agoLadybird?
- bityard 5mo agoIt's a good time to be using Vivaldi.
- Johnny_Bonk 5mo agoWow, so glad to see this on HN because yesterday coincidentally I told codex to figure out what was taking up space on my computer and lo and behold their was an ai model in my chrome folder... And i certainly didnt recall downloading that myself.
- baq 5mo agoI don't get the outrage. AAA games routinely take 100-200 GBs. I certainly prefer local inference to feeding google my private data over the network (assuming they actually don't do that anyway...)
- jnwatson 5mo agoA modest-sized security patch is routinely several gigabytes. Hell, a few hours of browsing Tiktok or Youtube will take more bandwidth. This is fake engagement bait.
- ChoGGi 5mo agoI download a game with intent, and they're stored on a larger drive than where my programs/user data is installed.
- bastawhiz 5mo agoI already pay for an LLM, and one that's much smarter than Gemini Nano. I didn't ask for this, I didn't make any choice for it to be installed, and I almost certainly won't ever use it.
- postalrat 5mo agoAI haters think their activism is going to make a difference what other people want.
- gmaszz 5mo agochrome://on-device-internals/ ..will tell you everything you need to know - including model state, file path, device capabilities, etc. And there's a single button to uninstall the model. There is also the ability to load a model from a central location, as suggested by another commenter here, although I haven't tested it yet. The official chrome.dev Prompt API Playground linked in the thread doesn't work. Chatgpt made a me tiny chrome extension to test the prompt and summariser api's when they announced last year - my laptop wasn't capable the time but these newer models are obviously smaller and more efficient, so it has sprung into life. Full prompt and code is on pastebin `7Ja3ATHZ` if anyone wants to test quickly. It summarises the current page and brainstorms app ideas based on the summary.
- gmaszz 5mo agoWhile the official Prompt API Playground doesn't work, the one for the Summarization API does... https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/summarization-api-playground/ https://chrome.dev/web-ai-demos/summarization-api-playground... and you can watch it generate the output token by token in the Event Logs: chrome://on-device-internals/
- dmarinus 5mo agoYou can load a model from this page but it's only for testing purposes on this page and it won't be used for the Prompt API.
- bastawhiz 5mo agoWhat a massive fail on Google's part. They could have given you the option to auth to Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT (or whatever) and provided a meaningfully better product and experience. But instead, they chose to push their crap on everyone. This is the bullshit I expect from Microsoft, not Google.
- tmaly 5mo agoI wonder what this model will do and if anyone can map out its capabilities?
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoTalk about a nothing burger. "OOh they downloaded 4GB!" You mean 30 minutes of Netflix? The carbon emissions thing apparently isn't a big deal since the author says the browser's AI use is cloud based anyway, and offloading AI compute from the DC to the browser isn't really increasing carbon is it? Reads like another AI doomer trying to find something to get angry about.
- kbelder 5mo ago>offloading AI compute from the DC to the browser isn't really increasing carbon is it? That is actually an interesting question. I would think that any given amount of processing is at least slightly more efficient when running on large-scale cloud hardware, but I have no idea whether it's a few percent or 75%. There's also some overhead, so maybe there's no gain for smaller jobs.
- tredre3 5mo agoTry to look outside your bubble. Millions of people still have monthly quotas on their internet plan, and 4GB can be a big chunk of it (possibly over all of it, in some cases). Google should have asked.
- HlessClaudesman 5mo agoA 4gb unbidden download is insane! I'm still running machines with 30gb HDs. I blame the kids these days (waggles fist), downloading their Pokiman shows at 4-5gb a pop! No respect for their disk space limited elders. I'm actually gonna have to uninstall Chrome from a few machines tonight.
- ComputerGuru 5mo agoThis might be worth it if Gemma4 E2B were a good model, but honestly it's absolutely useless in all our testing without further training and finetuning, and those aren't usecases that are fit for normal web browser use such that one would care to support it by adding such overly broad and expensive infrastructure to make it happen. Gemma 4 E4B is a much better model, but it's too large to simply download and run everywhere. IMHO, this is jumping the gun. Google's going through a lot of effort to release a model that will give everyone a very poor first impression of what on-device models are capable of, souring it for everyone for a long time afterwards. It would be better to wait until a smaller, better model ships before doing this.
- crumpled 5mo agoMost 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
- ComputerGuru 5mo ago> I suppose this means that ALL the browser vendors are likely to implement something Mozilla has taken a strong stand against the prompt api.
- crumpled 5mo agoI had to dig around to see where they took the stand. https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#issuecomment-4347988313 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#i... Mozilla makes great points. Even if the API is model agnostic, which it ought to be designed as from the very beginning to even be considered a spec, models can act vastly different. Mozilla didn't say this but the user should at least be presented an option to choose which model (at least once) starting from day one, even if your browser only has one option available. That's assuming a universe where Google plans on actually being concerned about standards adoption.
- t1234s 5mo agoIt's funny how they steal 4gb of local storage but also will sell you cloud storage when you run low on space.
- liendolucas 5mo agoHas anyone tried out to chmod 400 the download directories? Perhaps that prevents the whole thing to work... I haven't touched a Chrome browser in a very long time and I just hope that other vendors don't take a similar route.
- rmac 5mo agoon desktop you have read/write access to the chrome "app data" on android aicore: mediatek, qualcomm, aosp vendors, and google will pull down models you cant touch
- fithisux 5mo agoIs it true for Chromium too?
- Yaqub_W 5mo agoIf you use PSD (profile-sync-daemon or similar) to mount browser profiles to RAM to lessen SSD/NVMe wear. This might be an issue for you.
- zarzavat 5mo agoThere's simply no reason to be using Google Chrome in 2026. Purge it from your computer and install a less user hostile browser. Google Chrome just exists to make Google money at your expense, to sell your data and deplete your battery.
- marliechiller 5mo agoWhat do you suggest as alternatives? Currently I'm using firefox which seems ok but I know they are propped up by google somewhat
- phyzome 5mo agoI mean, if your choices are "propped up somewhat by Google" and "literally run by literally Google"...
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoBrave
- guizadillas 5mo agokeep using firefox
- zarzavat 5mo agoFirefox, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium. Firefox is dependent on Google for funding, but not for source code. Brave is dependent on Google for source code, but not for funding. Safari is dependent on neither but Apple locks down the experience. Hopefully Ladybird will deliver us from our Google dependence in a year or two. It's already usable for very light web browsing. I wrote this comment on Ladybird.
- thenoblesunfish 5mo agoIt's annoyingly huge, but is this worse than that? It's software - it does stuff and takes up space. If it takes up more space than you think the stuff is worth, then complain it's bloated, sure, but I am not sure why "silently" is being thrown around.
- anshumankmr 5mo agoThe alternative is an AI model hosted on their servers (cause whether we like it or not)
- timbit42 5mo agoI'd rather they pay for the electricity.
- dunham 5mo agoI don't see how this is going to work when every application decides to ship and run a 4GB model, competing for video memory. It's going to be the Electron problem times 10.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoThese people owe me a RAM upgrade. This is out of control.
- chris_explicare 5mo ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 5mo agoWhy they insert their "DNA" without my consent?
- caymanjim 5mo ago...so what? If Chrome had installed 4GB for some other tooling that most people don't need, would anyone care? My operating system installs with a million default packages that I don't need. Users install applications with optional features all the time. Applications install additional tooling so that they'll function all the time. To the other point: of course Claude Desktop modifies the browser--that's how it works. Most apps install integrations with existing apps. Often apps install a whole collection of plugins, even for things the user doesn't use, so they're available if the user does start using the other apps. The fact that this happens to be AI-related is a moot point. The environment concern is utter nonsense. They're not using everyone's browser to power AI for others as some kind of shared collective resource. 4GB is not a lot of data in the grand scheme of things (beyond general application bloat). I have more than 4GB worth of ads shoved in my face every month. The legal argument is facile as well. When you install any application, its terms of service cover functional updates and additions. You don't have to explicitly consent to all of them. Other than the size of it, I don't have any problem with anything this article is mentioning. This is a huge nothingburger that only caught peoples' attention because of the irrelevant mention of AI.
- liminis 5mo agoI think any program suddenly x5'ing its install size would raise eyebrows as to its purpose.
- dml2135 5mo ago> If Chrome had installed 4GB for some other tooling that most people don't need, would anyone care? Of course I would. It’s already the largest application on my computer, and I only keep it around for when a site doesn’t render right in Firefox. This kind of size increase clearly pushes it over the line for me and it’s getting uninstalled. Have you seen SSD prices recently?
- caymanjim 5mo agoI was overly-dismissive of the 4GB part. The author's main points were all the other alarmist nonsense, though.
- djha-skin 5mo ago> Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. OH MY GOODNESS, this is the WORST headline. If Google Chrome comes with an AI model, and you install Chrome of your own free will, you just gave consent. The "climate costs" are happening whether or not the AI is there. Sure, maybe it makes the hardware work a bit harder, but like, come on. I'm still using my computer anyway. YOU are the one costing the climate, not Google. You're the one turning the "On" button on. I don't even know why headlines like these are taken seriously.
- guizadillas 5mo agoconsent implies people know what they are downloading but this is a silent feature they are adding. regular people download Chrome to just use a browser, they don't consent to running an AI model.
- bergheim 5mo agoCurious how this thread would have been if Firefox did that.
- guizadillas 5mo agosame or worst since at least people put Firefox in a pedestal, but they didn't, they actually pushed to stop this
- herf 5mo agoIf you back up to "intention" it's fully insane to make a GDPR argument against on-device AI. Yes it downloads bits, but those bits are not there to identify you - they are basically a local copy of the internet. This enables private data to be kept on-device. Having no personal data leave the device is fantastic for GDPR compliance. The good point in this article is about how the "AI" features in Chrome all use Google's cloud API and not a local model. That's true and some of it should be local. ("AI mode" uses the Web index, so it fundamentally cannot be local, but there are features that could be.)
- dgellow 5mo agoAgreed, strange line of argument
- MicosWoid 5mo ago[dead]
- arjie 5mo agoThe future is local models. This makes sense and I wouldn't be surprised if future web standards require this to be swappable so that you can use a model of your choice as the intelligence in the various APIs. Being able to use summarization and text extraction locally will be a powerful enabler. Apple's ability to copy text out of photos etc. is really useful.
- blurbleblurble 5mo agoThis is total flamebait
- hansmayer 5mo ago[flagged]
- mikewarot 5mo agoSo we've all got a local LLM on our machine. Can it be the basis for nano-openclaw? Can I use it to run a Karpathy optimization loop?
- TheRealPomax 5mo ago600 comments and yet no one's questioning the math, just running with "4GB" even though the fsevents log literally says that the file is the result of an unpack operation? The file might be 4GB but the transfer sure as heck wasn't, so what are we even talking about? How much data is actually transferred? Can someone just grab that weights.bin file and zip it up with max compression and report a more realistic number that we can do the math with, if the number is even worth doing the math for?
- J8K357R 5mo agoSo that's why Chrome kills my PC's memory?
- pier25 5mo agois this only for desktop or will they bloat phones and tablets too?
- crazygringo 5mo agoFraming 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 practical discussion to have. Framing it around consent is unnecessarily inflammatory and makes it harder to have a discussion, not easier.
- croes 5mo agoA 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?
- TulliusCicero 5mo agoBy that reasoning, any novel/cutting-edge addition to a browser or other software is wrong? Every standard was new at some point.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- llbbdd 5mo ago> By that reasoning, any novel/cutting-edge addition to a browser or other software is wrong? This is IME the default position on HN. Seemingly a complete showcase of the appropriate scope of web technology can be found at http://info.cern.ch http://info.cern.ch.
- wtallis 5mo agoThe question of whether web browsers will one day be expected to normally include an LLM is not at all relevant to the situation at hand, where that absolutely is not the expected or typical behavior of a browser. Google should be asking for consent now even if they expect in several years time to be able to presume consent for this.
- fuzzy_biscuit 5mo agoThe question I have is whether there is a means of disabling that download or preventing that functionality.
- angry_octet 5mo agoYou could probably truncate the weights to be much smaller and it would just cause a runtime error. Or replace it with mostly zeros. Unlikely that they checksum the file. But ultimately it is a losing battle -- in browser LLM is coming, and future APIs will expose it to js, and it will become essential.
- luke727 5mo agoThe majority of comments seem to think this is not a big deal. Not surprising from this crowd, but disconcerting nonetheless.
- AmazingEveryDay 5mo agoAgreed, very disappointing. I wonder if this was 40gb would it still be celebrated? 100gb? At what point, if ever would this be recognized as an unwanted waste of space?
- ramchella 5mo ago[flagged]
- Spooky23 5mo agoChrome also silently installs a powerful relational database engine without warning or consent. All of your history, trivially searchable. Imagine the waste heat generated by the browser bar conducting thousands of non-consensual searches every time you type.
- mr_toad 5mo agoSQLite is around 1MB or less. This download is four thousand times larger.
- caycep 5mo agoNowadays I wonder if it's best practice to run everything in a desktop VM and not on your actual computer...
- ProofHouse 5mo agoMasterclass. Hope some qualified lawyers just got wet.
- crimebrasil 5mo ago[dead]
- hansvm 5mo agoThat's timely. I had been thinking of trying Chrome out again, but it looks like it's in my interests to remain fully de-Googled.
- IvanK_net 5mo ago"sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions" ? Is that what 0.0000001% of the worlds population produces in one day?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- newsoftheday 5mo agoThis is what I've done after spending some time to look into it, this is for Linux Desktop: Delete Chrome's silent 4 GB AI model file and AI In Chrome, go to: chrome://flags Search for and Disable these: Enables optimization guide on device Prompt API for Gemini Nano AI Mode Open DevTools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I). Click the Settings (gear icon). Go to AI Innovations and uncheck Enable AI assistance. For Linux, in a bash shell, this should prevent Chrome from trying to download the file again because the root user instead of my user, will own the file/directory. sudo rm -rf ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo rm -rf ~/.config/googlechrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo touch ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo chmod 400 ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo touch ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo chmod 400 ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel In case they already existed from doing the above previously, make sure root user owns them. sudo chown root:root ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel sudo chown root:root ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel List to check them. ls -l ~/.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel ls -l ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/OptGuideOnDeviceModel
- hashseed 5mo agoDevTools uses a server side model, and only after you opt in with explicit consent.
- eclipticplane 5mo agoOr accidentally trigger it because you're using a key binding you've used for 15 years that, upon hitting an unexpected consent screen, triggers the consent button.
- newman314 5mo agoFWIW, first two sections worked for Chrome on Windows.
- account42 5mo agoThat's a lot of steps compared to using a browser that doesn't treat your computer as their property.
- londons_explore 5mo agoThey do this so they don't have to host the model on Google servers and then have claims of "Google spies on chrome users and uploads all their data to Google servers, including private dm's".
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo agoAlternative to archive.ph Works without Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no DDoS, no geoblocking, etc. https://web.archive.org/web/20260504192142if_/https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260504192142if_/https://www.th...
- alliao 5mo agoall in storage stocks! imagine how much extra storage the world over is required...
- antonvs 5mo agoIn related news, I’ve uninstalled Google Chrome on all my devices. I strongly recommend you all do the same.
- notnullorvoid 5mo agoThe whole Prompt API is poorly designed. Devs will end up trying to fine tune very specific prompts out of necessity, only to have them break with the next model update. The logic around not providing access to model version to prevent fingerprinting is laughable when the suggestion to counteract fingerprinting from prompting is the model should only update when user agent string updates. Just put the damn API behind a explicit user permission.
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoThat's why I hate Google. They do the same shit that Microsoft and treat their customer as crap.
- wrxd 5mo agoI'm not a fan of this being downloaded by default. Still, I very much prefer that, if something if Chrome uses a LLM, that's done via a local LLM rather than by via an API call
- aucisson_masque 5mo agoI would prefer they use their own electricity to run these LLM that I don't need. Api calls are fine imo, running it on my computer isn't.
- postalrat 5mo agoHow much electricity is too much?
- davb 5mo agoAn 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 4GB bloat for an AI model, I’d much prefer it to install one copy, system-wide. 4GB per Windows or Linux lab machine, rather than a 4TB minimum load on our NFS server and 4GB downloads per user, per machine on our Windows labs.
- qudiqudi 5mo agoWhy not force a light-weight browser and prohibit Chrome?
- EvanAnderson 5mo agoThat would create vastly more support issues. You don't get to choose the software your users need.
- davb 5mo agoIndeed. We look after a huge, very diverse set of users (university science faculty - many thousands in our faculty, but tens of thousands across all faculties and professional services teams). According to https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share Chrome has over 65% market share for desktops - not supporting Chrome would be overly restrictive. Our users interact with a huge array of internal and external sites and web apps, virtually all of which will be tested on Chrome. Our LMS, collaboration tools, internal apps, SIEM tooling, HR systems, ERP, knowledge exchange partner portals - it's all been tested on, and works with, Chrome. And we're not in a position to force thousands of vendors to make sure their applications are standards compliant and work in less popular browsers (as much as we might like to). Not to mention the deluge of tickets we'd be dealing with when incompatibilities arise; banning Chrome would cripple us. Google have backed us into a corner with this one by making a careless default choice that takes advantage of their market dominance and forces us to work around their decision.
- joecool1029 5mo agoHard to believe it's over 10 years since they first started pulling crap like this by downloading a binary to listen for 'OK Google' (including on chromium builds): https://lwn.net/Articles/648392/ https://lwn.net/Articles/648392/
- methuselah_in 5mo agoAnother reason to switch to Firefox.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- taf2 5mo agoWhat’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
- xbar 5mo agoChrome has no moat and is always evil. I advocate against it whenever it comes up.
- llbbdd 5mo agoRolled my eyes when this article got to the unlawful and climate parts. Rolled my eyes harder when I clicked to the homepage and saw what the main sell of this site is. I'd ask why this is so high on HN but it's so tailor-made for this audience I'm more disappointed than surprised.
- dhosek 5mo agoOK, I rarely use Chrome (I like Safari and only ever open Chrome on the increasingly rare occasions when a site doesn’t work in Safari and lately it’s turned out that the site is just broken) but looking at the article and the comments here, I can’t figure out where this 4GB is supposed to be stored. None of the likely cases panned out when I looked.
- dnemmers 5mo agoI’m guessing there’s some UX metric out there, that if they pre-load downloading the model, the user is more likely to stick with trying things out; rather than have them wait for a hefty download to complete.
- jamesgeck0 5mo ago[dead]
- userbinator 5mo agoNot too long ago, someone submitted an AI demo to HN that resulted in a 3.1GB download upon visiting the page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823460 It reminds me of the "dialup warnings" common 2 decades ago on huge pages (often containing many images). Yes, bandwidth and storage has gotten cheaper, but the unwanted waste should still be called out. I'm not even anti-AI, having waited several hours recently to get some local models to experiment with, but that's because I wanted to and made the decision to use that bandwidth.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5mo agoI stopped using chrome 15 years ago and de-googled my life 5 years ago. The hardest thing to let go in fact was Gmaps (most alternatives, until recently, were not great) and I'm still captured by android, but rome was not built in a day. Quitting chrome these days is the easiest thing to do. The writing is on the way. You don't control the browser on your network, google does. ANd for better or worse, google's priority is AI at this time. Sysadmins should take notice. If the network is ~65% chrome and thus deemed painful, take the gradual approach. Do not push chrome on new devices or users. Watch that problem slowly go away.
- Legend2440 5mo agoWait, Chrome has been around for 15 years? Damn I'm old.
- bean469 5mo ago> most alternatives, until recently, were not great Curious to know, what viable alternatives did you discover?
- nesk_ 5mo agoKagi Maps isn't bad, it's slow but POIs are there with enough data.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5mo agoGmaps WV while using VPN. Download from Fdroid. Its miles ahead of something like Osmand , which i really, really, tried to like for a year, but its a UX disaster (i could never ever figure it out)
- Vinnl 5mo agoIs that a webview loading Gmaps? That's not what I expected to call "degoogling", haha. The OSMand UX is clearly not made for casual use, but Comaps is basically the main user-friendly application. It is missing a couple of commonly-used features though, most notably traffic information, which of course Google bases on data collected from its users.
- caonidaye 5mo agounfortunately you have probably consented and its between the lines of user agreement
- doctoboggan 5mo agoAI generated header image and a heavy scent of LLM prose, but this guy still complains about the "insane climate costs" of google's 4GB on device LLM?
- fastball 5mo agoIt is very ironic that this post comes from "The Privacy Guy", given that the whole point of this model is to run inference on your own device rather than sending queries to the cloud, which is also much less power intensive than sending a query to OpenAI.
- sgbeal 5mo agoThe following seems to keep Chrome from re-downloading this beast: # From one's $HOME dir: rm -fr ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel mkdir -p ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel touch ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/weights.bin chmod 0400 ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/weights.bin chmod 0500 ./.config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel Adapt as appropriate for your OS. For "Chrome Unstable" installs, the dir name is google-chrome-unstable. This has, so far, kept Chrome from (re)installing that file on my system. Hypothetically the parts involving weights.bin aren't needed so long as the containing directory is not writable.
- oneeyedpigeon 5mo agoFYI, this doesn't appear to work on macOS, unless I'm lucky enough that Chrome has never installed anything related to this on my machine. I don't even have a ~/.config/google-chrome directory; it's possible Google is using some Apple-alternative to that standard.
- AdminAccount 5mo agoMight be a good addition for https://superuser.com/questions/1937372/ https://superuser.com/questions/1937372/
- sgbeal 5mo ago> Might be a good addition for https://superuser.com/questions/1937372/ https://superuser.com/questions/1937372/ Done! Edit: nevermind - i've deleted it. The community guidelines request/require that responses actually attempt to answer the question (how to block all AI usage), which this response does not address.
- OliverSmith34 5mo agoThey want u to buy more and more storage
- BionicAI 5mo ago[flagged]
- WhereIsTheTruth 5mo agolocal: FUCK YOU GOOGLE cloud: FUCK YOU GOOGLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AeO-dKGBLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AeO-dKGBLs
- cachius 5mo agoPure, unadulterated, poorly researched and factually incorrect clickbait. Question from last November, even referring to macOS, by @paulirish: https://superuser.com/q/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-optguideondevicemodel-safely-its-taking-up-4gb https://superuser.com/q/1930445/can-i-delete-the-chromes-opt... With policy setting, debug url, docs in the answers. One search away.
- cachius 5mo agoFor completeness: The single policy setting name to disable model download is GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/gen-ai-local-foundational-model-settings/ https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/gen-ai-local-founda... The current state can be viewed at the internal debug URL chrome://on-device-internals/ Since January there's a user facing toggle in Settings > System > On-device AI in Chrome Canary https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/google-chrome-now-lets-you-turn-off-on-device-ai-model-powering-scam-detection/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligenc..., described in Chrome Help Center at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/16961953https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/16961953?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/16961953https://sup...
- thrownaway561 5mo agoIs this just for mobile devices or does this impact desktops as well?
- LurkandComment 5mo agoI'm just going to say this: Wouldn't load for me in Chrome, but the article loaded instantly in Edge... I never use Edge, I was just curious.
- tckk 5mo agoThis sounds just like how Tesla seems to be doing AI training on parked Teslas now, without asking permission. He even boasts about it on twitter. Meanwhile car batteries are draining faster. Costing the consumer electricity & battery cycle life.
- ChrisRR 5mo agoWell I hope it's not installed into the roaming profile
- danborn26 5mo agoA 4GB silent payload is completely unacceptable for a browser. The bandwidth and storage waste alone should make this an opt-in feature.
- Kapura 5mo agoI have been thinking about this for 24 hours now and I have to say this has me mad as hell. Software companies treat the users like fucking cattle to be led to whatever slaughter will be most profitable this quarter. Capital has fully inverted the hopes and promise of software I glimpsed in my youth.
- paolomon 5mo ago[dead]
- beanjuiceII 5mo agothen dont use google chrome..i'm fine with it
- tithos 5mo agoThis is why I switched to Brave a long time ago. It’s far from perfect, but it would never do anything like that.
- mring33621 5mo agowell, if it's already there and keeps coming back, can I use it? A local Gemini Nano might be useful!
- predkambrij 5mo agoThis is nothing, compared to crimes that Windows Update does.
- hotsalad 5mo agoWhy a 4GB model? I just tested Firefox's AI; when you long press a link and agree to enable summaries it downloads a mere 369MB model.
- miguelspizza 5mo agoI’m not sure why this is getting so much hate. This is the future people, AI is a primitive of modern software, just be thankful chrome ships this locally
- silexia 5mo agoI can no longer run Google Chrome on a new powerful $1,500 2025 laptop. I don't know what it is doing, but about thirty tabs just doing basic browsing and Gmail eats all of my resources.
- anishksrini 5mo ago[flagged]
- guilhas 5mo agoIt would be better a systemwide download? Of course Maybe manually point to a local endpoint with one of the multiple 100s of GBs of models that I already downloaded? Even better Don't even know what the model is for... but as things are, one of the alternatives would probably be send high amounts of user data to google which is worse. I would personally pay to have a 4GB download and keep my data/privacy So this is an odd take from a "privacy guy"
- appz3 5mo ago[flagged]
- theuniverseson 5mo ago[flagged]
- t0mpr1c3 5mo agoGoogle Chrome is malware.
- yamanakatakeshi 5mo ago[dead]
- lugut 5mo agoI consent
- lugut 5mo agoI concent