alt Hacker NewsGoogle Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
Comments
...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.
Has 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.
"sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions" ? Is that what 0.0000001% of the worlds population produces in one day?
Curious how this thread would have been if Firefox did that.
Nowadays I wonder if it's best practice to run everything in a desktop VM and not on your actual computer...
The question I have is whether there is a means of disabling that download or preventing that functionality.
They want u to buy more and more storage
So 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?
Botnet browser does botnet things, not surprised.
unfortunately you have probably consented and its between the lines of user agreement
If 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!
Rolled 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.
While 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.
I wonder what this model will do and if anyone can map out its capabilities?
So that's why Chrome kills my PC's memory?
on 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
If 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.
it's so absurd at this point. isn't chrome already so much abused.
What 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.
all in storage stocks! imagine how much extra storage the world over is required...
The majority of comments seem to think this is not a big deal. Not surprising from this crowd, but disconcerting nonetheless.
A 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.
The 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.
In related news, I’ve uninstalled Google Chrome on all my devices. I strongly recommend you all do the same.
It's a good time to be using Vivaldi.
Like 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.
is this only for desktop or will they bloat phones and tablets too?
Does Chromium do this?
These people owe me a RAM upgrade. This is out of control.
I 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!
That's why I hate Google. They do the same shit that Microsoft and treat their customer as crap.
Talk 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.
It'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.
This 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.
chrome://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.
Masterclass. Hope some qualified lawyers just got wet.
I feel this is great in combination with an agent like OpenClaw or Hermes.
Time to switch.
600 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?
> 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.
Why they insert their "DNA" without my consent?
>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.
Another reason to switch to Firefox.
Is it true for Chromium too?
Google/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
The alternative is an AI model hosted on their servers (cause whether we like it or not)