4 ms·

Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC

78 points by haebom 3mo ago

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Story from May; Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964
- haebom 3mo ago
  So, Did Google respond?
  - SurprisedTiger 3mo ago
    In the only way they know how :-)
  - kccqzy 3mo ago
    Google’s PR team is so bad at managing their reputation that their response wouldn’t have mattered. Apple can download a 4GB Apple Intelligence model onto your phone (which likely has lower storage than your PC) without any controversy; Google cannot.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
taf2 3mo ago
i love the built in AI - i created this tic tac toe game with an AI trash talking opponent -> https://taf2.github.io/ai-tic-tac-toe-trash-talk/ https://taf2.github.io/ai-tic-tac-toe-trash-talk/
- Banditoz 3mo ago
  The page uses 10% of my CPU while doing nothing on it.
  - rvnx 3mo ago
    At least no regrets purchasing that expensive CPU and the solar panels
    - DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
      wait till you open my website, it will crash your GPU just from rendering the fractal
guilhermeasper 3mo ago
IMO If you're into tech and still use Chrome*, that's on you. If you are not, you probably don't really care unless you need extra space on your PC. *Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.
- comboy 3mo ago
  Switched from firefox few months ago, I don't like google, but firefox has only few percent of market share currenly, many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), which simply make it unusable. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it. The overall browsers situation is less than ideal.
  - ngetchell 3mo ago
    Don't be so dramatic. Firefox on macOS is perfectly usable.
  - dinkleberg 3mo ago
    That is weird, I've daily driven firefox for the better part of a decade (aside from when my employers have required chrome) and seldom encounter issues. I'm curious where you're hitting these. In fact, since ublock origin got removed from Chrome, the experience is far better on firefox. Also, if everyone chooses to not use firefox because it has low market share, it'll remain low market share forever.
  - gpm 3mo ago
    > many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), I use firefox on mac and I have simply no clue what you're talking about. Tons of people use firefox on mac quite successfully... The only page that I know of that doesn't work is google earth - it doesn't work on linux either. (Technically it does, just incredibly laggy compared to chrome) I can't think of a single macos specific bug. Or a single mouse over related bug.
  - maccard 3mo ago
intellectronica 3mo ago
In their defense, it's an astonishingly good model for this size and you can use it for all sorts of cool stuff. Little demo of using this local model to inject AI into a page with a monkeyscript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s
- DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
  yeah I'm lowkey pissed off people keep insulting google for giving them an offline version of coding enabled wikipedia that they get literally 0 data analytics from (just turn your wifi and ethernet off and use it offline after downloading it) what part of the 4Gb file offended people? the fact that ai runs on the edge reliably now?
  - ecommerceguy 3mo ago
    Memory prices will adjust accordingly as this becomes the norm.
  - ghurtado 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
      you're welcome for the total lack of reading comprehension on your part. the edgy kids all hate google we get it but how the fk is a free offline ai model even a bad thing for privacy or even benefitting google in any way other than giving away privacy preserving tech for free they obviously aren't good intentioned here, and benefit from the aggregate of data but OpenAI and Anthropic might as well be enemies of all humanity given they contribute nothing back to the knowledge that is useable offline without their exorbitant api costs google should be better about their more evil tendencies but they now have sufficient competition that bootlicking is not an important thing to point out in the fight over open source(ish) models that allow people more freedom not less its all moot when nobody can afford hardware in the first place that can run ai models so I guess I'm just yelling into the void here
skybrian 3mo ago
This looks like AI-written blather, but it links to an article with useful information by someone who actually checked: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/fact-check-google-chrome-may-110000895.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/fact-check-google-...
- ghurtado 3mo ago
  If you had bothered reading the article you would realize you only provided redundant information.
- rvnx 3mo ago
  Thanks! Very informative. Lot of new details including the answer from Google and several experiments
elorant 3mo ago
I removed the model and then removed Chrome too. Good effing riddance.
jrflo 3mo ago
Ever since IO earlier this year when google showed their AI strategy I switched to firefox and duckduckgo and couldn't be happier with the decision. I am by no means anti-AI but users should be able to choose when they want to use these tools, google seems to want to shove it down everyone's throat.
- encomiast 3mo ago
  Did a similar thing, but went with Kagi + Orion. Also happy to have a few more free cycles from not thinking about Google.
sheept 3mo ago
Any page can silently trigger an additional multi-gigabyte download for Chrome users by just calling this API: await LanguageModel.create() Since the model is installed once per browser, LanguageModel.availability() could probably also be used for fingerprinting.
- tantalor 3mo ago
  Indeed, you could even do something like this: await fetch("/multi-gigabyte-download"); It even works on non-Chrome browsers.
  - bstsb 3mo ago
    i think the point is that one actually burns disk space, while the other is just a nuisance for people on plans with limited data
    - DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
      using a browser is an easy way to burn disk space and limited data light browsing is not a thing unless you somehow ensure javascript is disabled and all downloads are blocked
    - gruez 3mo ago
      You can store up to 80% of free disk space with indexeddb https://rxdb.info/articles/indexeddb-max-storage-limit.html https://rxdb.info/articles/indexeddb-max-storage-limit.html
- bri3d 3mo ago
  Just the availability wouldn't be that bad from a fingerprinting standpoint (getting one bit that a majority of Chrome users have is just the same bits you already have, usually), except, it also exposes whether the underlying hardware is "eligible," and once it's running, you can also benchmark the language model performance. It's a mess. I think it might also be broken and work in iframes, which would be an even bigger mess; there are a few bug reports suggesting this although many of them look like slop. This feature was massively bungled; I actually don't overall hate the idea of it (having a shared, pre-downloaded model that can run effectively from JS is kind of awesome versus sites downloading stuff into LocalStorage to use with hacked up wasm/webgl inference engines), but it really, really needed a permissions dialog and a proper anti-fingerprinting model.
maxloh 3mo ago
To prevent Chrome from automatically downloading the model, go to Settings → On-device AI.
- sigsergv 3mo ago
  or open page chrome://settings/system
rvnx 3mo ago
You can try the model here: https://chromeai.org/ https://chromeai.org/ -> Press the left edit button to start a new context. It's free, multi-language, well tested, respecting privacy (no cloud needed), nothing extra to install. Quite nice actually. Like what iPhones do, and everybody is ok with it. Chrome is not just a browser, it's a Window (ahem) to the web, almost an operating system considering the wide scope. Average game is 80 GB, Call of Duty 200 GB+, etc It's a quite oriented title: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent The same news can be read as: Amazing, Chrome now includes a fully offline AI so you don't have to send your secrets to ChatGPT A proper journalist would have found the middle ground, explained that this is by default, can be made optional and to raise the issue to Google as "Cons: this uses bandwidth and user is not aware of it".
judge2020 3mo ago
Only problem is that it doesn’t prompt “do you want to download this/enable AI”, right? Otherwise, local AI is exactly what most people want instead of needing to pay rent to big tech companies for AI use*. Open-weight models would also be nice, but I imagine the people who care about that _and_ want to use Chrome are using Chromium or de-googled Chromium. * other than how everyone is already paying rent in the form of increased energy costs due to increased demand from this massive ramp of data center development everywhere, regardless of if they want to use AI or not
imnes 3mo ago
From a year ago. They talked about adding the ability for Chrome to install Gemini Nano on-demand when a web app wants to use it. I guess this is the next step, making it always available by default. Practical built-in AI with Gemini Nano in Chrome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpZCWYrSxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpZCWYrSxM
dang 3mo ago
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 - May 2026 (1143 comments)
- DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
  [flagged]
satvikpendem 3mo ago
I personally use Firefox mainly due to extension support so I don't experience this. However, as a developer, the embedded Gemma local model in Chrome is vastly better to be included as a one time download than it is to download an AI model for every site you visit, as AI and especially local AI becomes increasingly more common. It is the same idea that Apple and Android and Windows have with their built-in foundation models in the OS. So in that case I can appreciate what Chrome is doing, as it will be saving a lot of bandwidth over time. People have asked me what use cases this has, and I've been making little apps with on-device AI such as a calorie estimator and tracker for food, or a page summarizer or translated (the latter of which Firefox actually already has using a local model). Why pay for a cloud model when the user has a perfectly good model themselves?
ghurtado 3mo ago
The amount of Google bootlickers and sycophants in this thread is genuinely concerning.
- scottyah 3mo ago
  It's a cool new feature with lots of potential and almost no downsides, what makes you descend into such attacks?
mrinterweb 3mo ago
I'm a big fan of local models, and moving inference from the cloud to local machines is great, but there's a couple potential problems with this. LLMs take significant (V)RAM resources to run (which is in short supply on consumer hardware), and we don't know that Google won't send local conversation logs to their own servers (kind of surprised if they don't). So if you think you're having a private local conversation in Chrome, I wouldn't be so sure.
gumby271 3mo ago
I'm sorry but the AI model that was forced to write this article is struggling to explain why this is a problem. I get that a chrome update that suddenly balloons to 4gb+ is stupid, that's fair, but I'm not sure I understand the rest of the issues. They don't like the off-device AI features Google is forcing into everything, but they also don't like the on-device AI features since they don't do enough? Aside from taking up a lot of space as a web browser, I'm not sure I get it. Their explanation that Apple's version of this is fine but Google's isn't is wild too.
- rvnx 3mo ago
  The reality is that the move is great, it's a very cool and nice stuff, just that it takes bandwidth and space without letting the user know. A solution: New AI features are available for use offline, they will make you able to translate offline, get answers, summaries, etc, would you like to download / install them (~4 GB)? It is going to fix the experience in the UI. It's a significant misstep by Google in its form (probably lazy/hasted/bureaucratic release), but on the move itself, this is actually a very user-friendly initiative from Google. It's quite unfair in that specific case to say that Google = evil, and when Qwen = good. It's just about informing the user better so the bandwidth and space is not wasted. Giving user choice. They will fix it eventually, especially after raising the issue. But shouting here "Google = bad, me uninstall Google, if you use Google Chrome you are an idiot" are not a productive feedback for a product owner there.
  - gumby271 3mo ago
    > But saying "Google = bad, me uninstall Google, if you use Google Chrome you are an idiot" are not a productive feedback for a product owner there. I wasn't? I hope that wasn't directed at me since we seem to kind of agree otherwise. Unfortunately the vast majority of Chrome users wont understand that prompt. Google decided that the Chrome installer should be 4GB, that seems like a large web browser, but is it that crazy compared to anything else? Teams on my Mac is taking 1GB+ just in Applications (not to say I'm terribly happy about that). Chrome installs its own updates and has for a very long time, ensuring we dont have to support super old browser versions, I'm not sure where the line is.
pentagrama 3mo ago
I checked, and I do have the 4GB file on my system. The “Local AI” toggle is enabled. Chrome never asked for my consent to enable it. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/S4WTHxM https://imgur.com/a/S4WTHxM The 4GB file is located in C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\OptGuideOnDeviceModel\2025.8.8.1141 Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/wvTqfQM https://imgur.com/a/wvTqfQM
imnes 3mo ago
Serious question - why would Google need to ask user consent to push a new feature / update to Chrome? There's been a lot of new tech introduced through Chrome and eventually widely adopted and available everywhere. Without requiring user consent. QUIC + HTTP/3, WebP, Service Workers / PWAs, WASM, WebRTC, View Transitions API This feels like just another step of "make this new capability widely available so developers can adopt it if they want." This one seems to be all on-device local capabilities. Not calling additional APIs or sending data off-device. Is the argument just around "Don't use 4gb of drive space without asking me first"? What other issues does this introduce?
- judge2020 3mo ago
  Main externality is that this will use 4gb and X megabytes/gigabytes of RAM on the billions of devices that use Chrome. If RAM and disk usage needs have gone up linearly in the past decade, this technically causes a momentary immediate jump in those needs, although people still probably would only adjust on their regular upgrade cadence, maybe slightly faster than normal. *although this 4gb is probably very likely to go up even more, maybe 8, 16gb models - if the disk space is there, and the computer has the power to use bigger models, I don't see why Google wouldn't ship better more capable on-device models when possible (other than profit motive to push more non-local-ai requiring a Google One AI subscription). *this idea works absent of the recent AI datacenter-based demand for NAND and DRAM. If anything consumers are avoiding buying NAND or DRAM right now due to the prices.
cws_ai_buddy 3mo ago
[flagged]

78 points by haebom 3mo ago

Story from May; Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964

haebom 3mo ago
So, Did Google respond?
- SurprisedTiger 3mo ago
  In the only way they know how :-)
- kccqzy 3mo ago
  Google’s PR team is so bad at managing their reputation that their response wouldn’t have mattered. Apple can download a 4GB Apple Intelligence model onto your phone (which likely has lower storage than your PC) without any controversy; Google cannot.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

taf2 3mo ago

i love the built in AI - i created this tic tac toe game with an AI trash talking opponent -> https://taf2.github.io/ai-tic-tac-toe-trash-talk/ https://taf2.github.io/ai-tic-tac-toe-trash-talk/

Banditoz 3mo ago
The page uses 10% of my CPU while doing nothing on it.
- rvnx 3mo ago
  At least no regrets purchasing that expensive CPU and the solar panels
  - DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
    wait till you open my website, it will crash your GPU just from rendering the fractal

guilhermeasper 3mo ago

IMO If you're into tech and still use Chrome*, that's on you. If you are not, you probably don't really care unless you need extra space on your PC. *Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.

comboy 3mo ago
Switched from firefox few months ago, I don't like google, but firefox has only few percent of market share currenly, many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), which simply make it unusable. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it. The overall browsers situation is less than ideal.
- ngetchell 3mo ago
  Don't be so dramatic. Firefox on macOS is perfectly usable.
- dinkleberg 3mo ago
  That is weird, I've daily driven firefox for the better part of a decade (aside from when my employers have required chrome) and seldom encounter issues. I'm curious where you're hitting these. In fact, since ublock origin got removed from Chrome, the experience is far better on firefox. Also, if everyone chooses to not use firefox because it has low market share, it'll remain low market share forever.
- gpm 3mo ago
  > many pages simply do not work properly with it, plus it has bugs on macos (like onmousover stuff), I use firefox on mac and I have simply no clue what you're talking about. Tons of people use firefox on mac quite successfully... The only page that I know of that doesn't work is google earth - it doesn't work on linux either. (Technically it does, just incredibly laggy compared to chrome) I can't think of a single macos specific bug. Or a single mouse over related bug.
- maccard 3mo ago

intellectronica 3mo ago

In their defense, it's an astonishingly good model for this size and you can use it for all sorts of cool stuff. Little demo of using this local model to inject AI into a page with a monkeyscript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPi33D8DoQ0&t=3000s

DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
yeah I'm lowkey pissed off people keep insulting google for giving them an offline version of coding enabled wikipedia that they get literally 0 data analytics from (just turn your wifi and ethernet off and use it offline after downloading it) what part of the 4Gb file offended people? the fact that ai runs on the edge reliably now?
- ecommerceguy 3mo ago
  Memory prices will adjust accordingly as this becomes the norm.
- ghurtado 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
    you're welcome for the total lack of reading comprehension on your part. the edgy kids all hate google we get it but how the fk is a free offline ai model even a bad thing for privacy or even benefitting google in any way other than giving away privacy preserving tech for free they obviously aren't good intentioned here, and benefit from the aggregate of data but OpenAI and Anthropic might as well be enemies of all humanity given they contribute nothing back to the knowledge that is useable offline without their exorbitant api costs google should be better about their more evil tendencies but they now have sufficient competition that bootlicking is not an important thing to point out in the fight over open source(ish) models that allow people more freedom not less its all moot when nobody can afford hardware in the first place that can run ai models so I guess I'm just yelling into the void here

skybrian 3mo ago

This looks like AI-written blather, but it links to an article with useful information by someone who actually checked: https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/fact-check-google-chrome-may-110000895.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/fact-check-google-...

ghurtado 3mo ago
If you had bothered reading the article you would realize you only provided redundant information.
rvnx 3mo ago
Thanks! Very informative. Lot of new details including the answer from Google and several experiments

elorant 3mo ago

I removed the model and then removed Chrome too. Good effing riddance.

jrflo 3mo ago

Ever since IO earlier this year when google showed their AI strategy I switched to firefox and duckduckgo and couldn't be happier with the decision. I am by no means anti-AI but users should be able to choose when they want to use these tools, google seems to want to shove it down everyone's throat.

encomiast 3mo ago
Did a similar thing, but went with Kagi + Orion. Also happy to have a few more free cycles from not thinking about Google.

sheept 3mo ago

Any page can silently trigger an additional multi-gigabyte download for Chrome users by just calling this API: await LanguageModel.create() Since the model is installed once per browser, LanguageModel.availability() could probably also be used for fingerprinting.

tantalor 3mo ago
Indeed, you could even do something like this: await fetch("/multi-gigabyte-download"); It even works on non-Chrome browsers.
- bstsb 3mo ago
  i think the point is that one actually burns disk space, while the other is just a nuisance for people on plans with limited data
  - DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
    using a browser is an easy way to burn disk space and limited data light browsing is not a thing unless you somehow ensure javascript is disabled and all downloads are blocked
  - gruez 3mo ago
    You can store up to 80% of free disk space with indexeddb https://rxdb.info/articles/indexeddb-max-storage-limit.html https://rxdb.info/articles/indexeddb-max-storage-limit.html
bri3d 3mo ago
Just the availability wouldn't be that bad from a fingerprinting standpoint (getting one bit that a majority of Chrome users have is just the same bits you already have, usually), except, it also exposes whether the underlying hardware is "eligible," and once it's running, you can also benchmark the language model performance. It's a mess. I think it might also be broken and work in iframes, which would be an even bigger mess; there are a few bug reports suggesting this although many of them look like slop. This feature was massively bungled; I actually don't overall hate the idea of it (having a shared, pre-downloaded model that can run effectively from JS is kind of awesome versus sites downloading stuff into LocalStorage to use with hacked up wasm/webgl inference engines), but it really, really needed a permissions dialog and a proper anti-fingerprinting model.

maxloh 3mo ago

To prevent Chrome from automatically downloading the model, go to Settings → On-device AI.

sigsergv 3mo ago
or open page chrome://settings/system

rvnx 3mo ago

You can try the model here: https://chromeai.org/ https://chromeai.org/ -> Press the left edit button to start a new context. It's free, multi-language, well tested, respecting privacy (no cloud needed), nothing extra to install. Quite nice actually. Like what iPhones do, and everybody is ok with it. Chrome is not just a browser, it's a Window (ahem) to the web, almost an operating system considering the wide scope. Average game is 80 GB, Call of Duty 200 GB+, etc It's a quite oriented title: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent The same news can be read as: Amazing, Chrome now includes a fully offline AI so you don't have to send your secrets to ChatGPT A proper journalist would have found the middle ground, explained that this is by default, can be made optional and to raise the issue to Google as "Cons: this uses bandwidth and user is not aware of it".

judge2020 3mo ago

Only problem is that it doesn’t prompt “do you want to download this/enable AI”, right? Otherwise, local AI is exactly what most people want instead of needing to pay rent to big tech companies for AI use*. Open-weight models would also be nice, but I imagine the people who care about that _and_ want to use Chrome are using Chromium or de-googled Chromium. * other than how everyone is already paying rent in the form of increased energy costs due to increased demand from this massive ramp of data center development everywhere, regardless of if they want to use AI or not

imnes 3mo ago

From a year ago. They talked about adding the ability for Chrome to install Gemini Nano on-demand when a web app wants to use it. I guess this is the next step, making it always available by default. Practical built-in AI with Gemini Nano in Chrome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpZCWYrSxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpZCWYrSxM

dang 3mo ago

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 - May 2026 (1143 comments)

DennisAleynikov 3mo ago
[flagged]

satvikpendem 3mo ago

I personally use Firefox mainly due to extension support so I don't experience this. However, as a developer, the embedded Gemma local model in Chrome is vastly better to be included as a one time download than it is to download an AI model for every site you visit, as AI and especially local AI becomes increasingly more common. It is the same idea that Apple and Android and Windows have with their built-in foundation models in the OS. So in that case I can appreciate what Chrome is doing, as it will be saving a lot of bandwidth over time. People have asked me what use cases this has, and I've been making little apps with on-device AI such as a calorie estimator and tracker for food, or a page summarizer or translated (the latter of which Firefox actually already has using a local model). Why pay for a cloud model when the user has a perfectly good model themselves?

ghurtado 3mo ago

The amount of Google bootlickers and sycophants in this thread is genuinely concerning.

scottyah 3mo ago
It's a cool new feature with lots of potential and almost no downsides, what makes you descend into such attacks?

mrinterweb 3mo ago

I'm a big fan of local models, and moving inference from the cloud to local machines is great, but there's a couple potential problems with this. LLMs take significant (V)RAM resources to run (which is in short supply on consumer hardware), and we don't know that Google won't send local conversation logs to their own servers (kind of surprised if they don't). So if you think you're having a private local conversation in Chrome, I wouldn't be so sure.

gumby271 3mo ago

I'm sorry but the AI model that was forced to write this article is struggling to explain why this is a problem. I get that a chrome update that suddenly balloons to 4gb+ is stupid, that's fair, but I'm not sure I understand the rest of the issues. They don't like the off-device AI features Google is forcing into everything, but they also don't like the on-device AI features since they don't do enough? Aside from taking up a lot of space as a web browser, I'm not sure I get it. Their explanation that Apple's version of this is fine but Google's isn't is wild too.

rvnx 3mo ago
The reality is that the move is great, it's a very cool and nice stuff, just that it takes bandwidth and space without letting the user know. A solution: New AI features are available for use offline, they will make you able to translate offline, get answers, summaries, etc, would you like to download / install them (~4 GB)? It is going to fix the experience in the UI. It's a significant misstep by Google in its form (probably lazy/hasted/bureaucratic release), but on the move itself, this is actually a very user-friendly initiative from Google. It's quite unfair in that specific case to say that Google = evil, and when Qwen = good. It's just about informing the user better so the bandwidth and space is not wasted. Giving user choice. They will fix it eventually, especially after raising the issue. But shouting here "Google = bad, me uninstall Google, if you use Google Chrome you are an idiot" are not a productive feedback for a product owner there.
- gumby271 3mo ago
  > But saying "Google = bad, me uninstall Google, if you use Google Chrome you are an idiot" are not a productive feedback for a product owner there. I wasn't? I hope that wasn't directed at me since we seem to kind of agree otherwise. Unfortunately the vast majority of Chrome users wont understand that prompt. Google decided that the Chrome installer should be 4GB, that seems like a large web browser, but is it that crazy compared to anything else? Teams on my Mac is taking 1GB+ just in Applications (not to say I'm terribly happy about that). Chrome installs its own updates and has for a very long time, ensuring we dont have to support super old browser versions, I'm not sure where the line is.

pentagrama 3mo ago

I checked, and I do have the 4GB file on my system. The “Local AI” toggle is enabled. Chrome never asked for my consent to enable it. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/S4WTHxM https://imgur.com/a/S4WTHxM The 4GB file is located in C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\OptGuideOnDeviceModel\2025.8.8.1141 Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/wvTqfQM https://imgur.com/a/wvTqfQM

imnes 3mo ago

Serious question - why would Google need to ask user consent to push a new feature / update to Chrome? There's been a lot of new tech introduced through Chrome and eventually widely adopted and available everywhere. Without requiring user consent. QUIC + HTTP/3, WebP, Service Workers / PWAs, WASM, WebRTC, View Transitions API This feels like just another step of "make this new capability widely available so developers can adopt it if they want." This one seems to be all on-device local capabilities. Not calling additional APIs or sending data off-device. Is the argument just around "Don't use 4gb of drive space without asking me first"? What other issues does this introduce?

judge2020 3mo ago
Main externality is that this will use 4gb and X megabytes/gigabytes of RAM on the billions of devices that use Chrome. If RAM and disk usage needs have gone up linearly in the past decade, this technically causes a momentary immediate jump in those needs, although people still probably would only adjust on their regular upgrade cadence, maybe slightly faster than normal. *although this 4gb is probably very likely to go up even more, maybe 8, 16gb models - if the disk space is there, and the computer has the power to use bigger models, I don't see why Google wouldn't ship better more capable on-device models when possible (other than profit motive to push more non-local-ai requiring a Google One AI subscription). *this idea works absent of the recent AI datacenter-based demand for NAND and DRAM. If anything consumers are avoiding buying NAND or DRAM right now due to the prices.

cws_ai_buddy 3mo ago

[flagged]