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Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage
- Holacc 6mo agoThe local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.
- gruez 6mo ago>You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy. How's this conspiracy supposed to work? A technical audience who cares about privacy aren't going to be placated by 4GB sitting on their disk. They're going to want some sort of analysis (like http interception), or probably not use chrome in the first place. A non-technical audience isn't going to make the association between 4GB of disk usage and the privacy implications.
- chronc6393 6mo ago> They're going to want some sort of analysis And I want $1 billion dollars. Doesn’t mean someone’s going to give it to me.
- hnlmorg 6mo agoEmail me your bank details and I’ll send the money
- gruez 6mo agoPoint is, nobody is going to be like "wow, chrome is eating up 4GB of my disk space? I totally trust it now!"
- nicce 6mo agoThat misses the point of the original commenter. He is saying that local model only powers things where privacy is not so relevant and that creates the illusion.
- skeeter2020 6mo ago1. I've got a Chrome local model stored on my drive 2. I see a heavily promoted "AI search" box in chrome Natural Conclusion: when I use all the promoted AI features in chrome it's using the local AI model. This is not true; Google is being intentionally misleading.
- apublicfrog 6mo agoI suspect the type of person who is even aware of this 4GB blob is the type of person who would research its usage. Pretty high venn diagram crossover.
- therealpygon 6mo agoYeah. The fictional user doesn’t know anything about AI but knows about this 4gb file…because of news stories about how bad a 4gb file must be. Outside of that, they don’t know or care and wonder if that means that need to add some more “memory” to their computer.
- shevy-java 6mo agoI am beginning to suspect Google is mass-sniffing on us here. Then it suddenly makes sense that the blob gathers everything.
- chrsw 6mo agoI'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?
- superkuh 6mo ago4GB 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.
- goalieca 6mo agoIronically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.
- apublicfrog 6mo agoIs that true? It feels wrong. Consumer grade SSDs and spinning disks are unlikely to be the products used in enterprise.
- windowsrookie 6mo agoAI 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.
- spookie 6mo agoLook at SSD prices over the last 6 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/
- kn100 6mo agoI reckon until the recent ai-gobbles-everything-up phenomena, this was mainly an Apple problem. Even fairly budget PCs come with at least 1tb of storage. Considering much beyond 2tb NAND gets scary pricing wise, I'm not that surprised we don't see much beyond that.
- superkuh 6mo ago
- zb3 6mo agoDid anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?
- add-sub-mul-div 6mo agoAnnoying, but are the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device?
- llbbdd 6mo ago[flagged]
- afavour 6mo ago“Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin? Yeah, there are a few.
- Supermancho 6mo ago>> the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device? > "Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin? The strawman derail notwithstanding, the answer is no. No they do not.
- FrozenThane269 6mo ago[dead]
- jmclnx 6mo agoPositive reinforcement anyone :) Anyway to me, 4G seems a bit lite for AI. I always avoided Chrome as much as possible, now I have a real reason to do so. I wonder if Chromium-based browsers is or will do the same?
- Weryj 6mo agoAnd Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.
- alwillis 6mo agoThat’s mostly because it’s an Electron app. It would be a fraction of that if it were a native app on macOS or Windows.
- SyrupThinker 6mo agoThis is more likely referring to the VM disk image the feature allocates, which would have little to do with Electron.
- nicce 6mo agoWell Electron includes Chromium. Maybe that pulls the 4GB model as well… not sure if it is Chrome only.
- Weryj 6mo agoThis, the vm bundle which reappears after you delete it. They say it's For Cowork and Claude Code, but if you don't use Cowork or CC sandboxing, it has no value. Considering I'm always finding things to delete on apples anaemic 512gb because I run out of space.
- rijavecb 6mo agoIt'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#issuecomment-4240319202 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543#issue...
- manquer 6mo agoDoesn’t seem to work for windows ?.
- thunderbong 6mo agoFrom 5 days ago, 1138 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219
- iamkrazy 6mo agoFirst IE, now Chrome. What gets into these companies heads once they get biggest market share? And the people working for these companies. How do you sleep at night bro?
- SadErn 6mo ago[dead]
- seam_carver 6mo agoI recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.
- datenyan 6mo agoI would love to use Safari more, but unfortunately Facebook Messenger and similar ilk (maybe all messaging apps?) seems to be completely busted on it.
- seam_carver 6mo agomessenger.com won't allow new sessions on any browsers afaik. https://www.facebook.com/messages https://www.facebook.com/messages works fine
- nicce 6mo agoI am scared to even open Chrome these days. The only app that randomly chunks 70% of CPU availability with one tab.
- shevy-java 6mo agoGoogle is abusing people here. I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse.
- sethops1 6mo agoThis is what finally pushed me into using Brave.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 Related: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964
- arkensaw 6mo agoChrome takes up a few gigs on windows for no good reason anyway, mostly caching of websites you went to one time
- spondyl 6mo agoI had wondered if this was actually a bug and not intentional: > When a user downloads or updates Chrome, Gemini Nano is downloaded on demand to ensure Chrome downloads the correct model for the user's hardware. The initial model download is triggered by the first call to a *.create() function (for example, Summarizer.create()) of any built-in AI API that depends on Gemini Nano. This sounds like it could be possible that some part of Chrome, or perhaps a privileged website (ie; google.com), could be invoking `*.create()` 100% of the time? I don't actually know that this is what's going on or even if it's likely mind you. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/understand-built-in-model-management#initial_model_download https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/understand-built-in-mod... It is also quite ironic that one of the docs pages is titled "Inform users of model download" although it goes on to talk about notifying in terms of model download time, not necessarily getting user consent: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/inform-users-of-model-download https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/inform-users-of-model-d...
- CalmBirch127 6mo ago[dead]
- HollowRidge427 6mo ago[dead]
- senectus1 6mo agoyet to see this on any linux system yet. might be windows only so far?
- WindyBolt907 6mo ago[dead]
- QuietLedge375 6mo ago[dead]
- therealpygon 6mo agoHogging? This is a dvd worth of data on systems that likely store 200 times that while Microsoft delivers 20 gb updates that they just leave duplicates of laying around. People are really acting like storage is precious… it’s not 1995. Uninstall the software if you don’t like it. Chrome isn’t the only browser… I might be more inclined to be understanding of this conversation if it was related to mobile phones, but desktops? I get that people think it should be opt-in, and I’m on the fence. There is also a simple way to disable on-device AI features. Outside of the “we never want AI” crowd, which fine whatever, I don’t get this weird focus on a 4gb in size. Maybe I’m just old and remember what it was like for disk space to actually be precious.
- kats 6mo agoI couldn't care less about this, it's not in the top 1 million problems. If this is an issue for you, seriously re-evaluate how you spend your time.