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.
You can try the model here: 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".
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 53.9 ms ] threadDiscussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964
*Except in your job, since you probably obligated to use.
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://tech.yahoo.com/ai/gemini/articles/fact-check-google-...
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".
* 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
Practical built-in AI with Gemini Nano in Chrome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjpZCWYrSxM
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?
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.
The “Local AI” toggle is enabled. Chrome never asked for my consent to enable it.
Screenshot: 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
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?