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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/browsers@programming.dev
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Cross-Posted, via Technology Community.

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

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[–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

If downloading a 4GB file is such a climate disaster, I think we need to examine stuff like the Nvidia driver (0.7GB), games, all of npm, etc.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    The concern isn't about the download, it's about the power it uses during local inferencing.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    That would certainly be a more apt concern, but the article is specifically talking about the network bandwidth:

    The article is, (in my opinion) unfairly and intentionally, confusing the non-consensual download energy use with the optional inference energy use.

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