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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.
That said, you might be surprised to learn that some of the models from 3b-9b could probably replace 80% of the things nonvibe coders use chatgpt for.
Its a good idea to run small models locally if your computer can host them for privacy and cash saving reasons. But how can you trust Google to autoinstall one on your machine in 2026? I just couldn't do it.
We can be positive the entire motivation of Chrome is user behavior surveillance. There's not a nano-chance in all the multiverses that Chrome model is doing anything privately. They've gone to extraordinary length to accomplish this. It's not for free.
I find it works fine for simple classification, translation, interpretation of images & audio. It can write longer prose, but it's pretty bad.
It can also write text in the format of a JSON schema or regexp for anything you might want to do with structured data.
Not happy about that as I would like to see more local models but that's the current state of things.
https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...
One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?
"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.
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.
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).
There’s nothing stopping Google Chrome from doing something similar except, I suspect, Google knows or feels it will result in many fewer installs of its bloatware.
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.
A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.
Of course that's what we get for giving the benefit of doubt to the company that insisted on learning the wrong things from the Google Buzz fiasco.
You're not even the customer when it comes to Google.
They simply read your mails, how would you expect there to be anything resembling decency in a company like that? It is the ad business.
Bad thing is that people still use gmail.
When Firefox does it, it sparks outrage across the internet, with entire forums filled with people vowing to leave Firefox forever and switching to something like Waterfor or Ilp/Zorp/Floop instead.
As a result, searching for experiences other people had with Firefox makes it sound like hell on earth, while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".
You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?
I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.
Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.
EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.
It's how you get things like "Browser monocultures are an issue, so don't use Chrome (Blink), use Brave (Chromium (Blink)) instead!" said in earnest.
Man, so many things could be better if people cared.
He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.
... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.
There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.
you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders
Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.
For as long as the funding for Firefox continues, it remains a viable option. And despite all their bad decisions of late, they still give users the ability to configure or disable user hostile components.
Their funding model is a risk, but I've been using Firefox and librewolf forever and I'd argue it's a much better option than chrome or edge, especially with a handful of plugins. A risk is still better than the actual realization of the risk.
With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.
On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.
The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.
HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot. And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.
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.
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.
1. Yes
2. Ask me later
Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.
An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses!
I'm not at all saying nothing matters so we shouldn't care. I just disagree about the utility of calling out specific things out of proportion to their place in the climate crisis. Tackle AI, yes, and fast fashion and cars, and ... that one change to Chrome? I guess if that's where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.
In my experience a game worth playing never exceeded 1 (one) gig in size.
It is only incompetent creators that feel the need to bury their incompetence under gigabytes of irrelevance.
So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.
[1]: https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/ [2]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... [3]: https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-ton...
29 grams for something that takes most folks less than 20 seconds to download? How many watts (neglecting the machinery was going to be running regardless of whether you are transferring something!) do you think it takes to transfer data?
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Coal, the absolute worst of all, represents 18 grams over 60 full seconds to produce 1000 watts of power.
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.
Also, someone installing Steam is going to expect large downloads, hell, the platform tells you the size as you're about to start the download.
I don't think anyone expects a browser to suddenly download 4GB, let alone behind their backs!
i certainly never activated it willfully. i use Chrome only as a fallback testing platform for web dev - a handful of times per month - yet both Chrome Stable and Chrome Unstable had installed this 4GB monstrosity in my home dir. 8GB of junk i'd never used. Both have since been uninstalled and replaced with Chromium.
If you google OptGuideOnDeviceModel, there’s already a lot of results of people asking what it is an how they can delete them. It’s not some kind of obscure niche feature.
I wonder when the first crypto miner-like malware appears that offloads model usage to the client computers.
Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.
[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?
For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.
The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260505052217/https://www.thatp...
https://archive.ph/sM7O5 (missing images and styling, but the content all seems to be there)
Or Firefox of course.
languagemodel should be an OS service..
Brave has always just worked for me and seems light on memory usage. Dunno why anyone would use chrome.
A lighter Brave.
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/. 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.
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.
>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).
Here chrome is just installing things behind your back, whether you really want it or not.
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.
Why not? It's about 60 000 London - New York City flights by the way (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...). And what's the benefit again?
Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?
It's never a binary thing. "Is using energy good or bad?" is a stupid question which can only provide stupid answers. It has to be placed in the context of whether it's proportionate to benefit.
Things which burn a lot of energy for little benefit - and in the case of AI, often negative benefit - end up more towards the "bad".
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w
[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...
[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...?
I mean this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions. Sustainable data centers using renewables etc. But not that the companies should associate/evaluate/consider bytes downloaded with environmental impact.
Technological progress is also societal progress. If we embraced degrowth in the 1800's (there was a ton of pollution back then, and a Malthusian belief in disaster!) we might not see slavery being abolished or women being able to vote.
Unfortunately, that automation is unreliable. It doesn't work across operating systems - Windows laptops won't enable data-saver mode when connected to iPhones and macOS laptops won't when connected to Android phones, and neither will enable it when connected to, say, public transport wifi.
And even if the OS has the information, websites can't reliably use it either. Firefox and Safari both don't implement the NetworkInformation API [1].
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/NetworkInfo...
You can also ask why the US government fails to protect the users. Corporate dictatorship at its finest.
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!
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.
> 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
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?
Hamburger is usually held up as a grotesque example in climate talk and can't be consumed with a clear conscious so are downloads insanely worse than we thought or is a hamburger not even in the same realm of climate damage as usually claimed.
If you're okay with 4GB being added, where would you draw a line? What if it downloaded a 40GB file? 400GB?
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.
These days, I just navigate away from anything that demands I use Chrome "for best results." One of the sites for a local utility company does this, so instead I just call monthly and pay or manage my service by phone. I'm old enough to remember when that was the preferred way after mailing personal cheques went the way of the dodo, so it does not feel that inconvenient to me, but I can see where it might for other people. Still, nobody said the fight to regaining our agency online would be easy. Or convenient.
I hate how much companies don't care about efficiency or their customers. It's like windows 11 requiring like 2 more GB of RAM just to see your desktop, what an upgrade, yuck.
I think the only time I've ever had to use Chrome instead of Firefox was because of some USB device thing that worked inside Chrome. Otherwise everything just works in Firefox.
It's frustrating.
I can recommend the following extensions:
- Youtube Enhancer
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)
- Slop Evader
- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)
Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.
I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and install Firefox. It was ridicolous!!! The amount of spam on the screen. How people can cope with this is beyond me. Especially if the solution doesn't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.
edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:
Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
in regular German, it would translate to:
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
In gendered German, it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
For me, it ruins the reading experience.
Ask any Emacs evangelist.
https://www.waterfox.com/blog/15-years-of-forking/
Gosh most of the time when I read people complain about firefox, it gives me the impression they have not even used firefox.
Chrome doesn't do that. I literally can't use Firefox anywhere I don't have a power socket.
My laptop also becomes a toaster.
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-o... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next...
On GrapheneOS they recommend Vanadium - a more secure Chromium fork - and specifically recommend against Firefox, but that's on mobile.
Just uBlock Origin pre-installed
https://helium.computer/
Yes, I hate that it's also Chromium, but no, there aren't real alternatives.
Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters
I stopped reading here because I know this is the ramblings of a whiny person that will contribute nothing, will solve nothing and is occupying space on the internet. Whatever is the climate cost of those kbytes of the page, it seems too much for me
This is satire, obviously.
Yes, 4GB of unintended traffic can absolutely wreck someone's finances.
> 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
Which apparently means it'll never install btw, even if I were to run Chrome. Another comment said they check for 22GB free space
4gb definitely isn’t a negligible amount of space on most people’s devices.
The quite successful it would seem MacBook Neo has 256GB of storage in its base configuration.
A MacBook Air and a basic sub $1000 Dell laptop starts at 512GB.
> To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 tabs open that nearly take up 4gb.
You are conflating disk and memory.
> The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion.
There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.
But I also see the point in it. We recently did a hackathon, and I considered relying on Gemma 4 for privacy considerations. The local model could interpret the user’s natural language request and derive less privacy revealing requests to form based on that.
But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.
I never conflated anything. I said it's a neglible amount of space for current hardware, which I still believe.
If anything, the fact that I think the amount of space is acceptable for the amount of ram a modern laptop has exaggerates the point.
> There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.
That's the approach they take for most of their features.
> But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.
Which seems to be the motivation of having these local models embedded in the browser's available resources: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api