I did that too, but that was a very long time ago. At the time, I had some serious problems with getting specific apps working. Is it any better these days?

All the bare bones basics still worked fine. It's just that the modern world kinda expects you to have access to much more than what was considered basics back then. Just because you have email and a web browser on your phone doesn't make your phone smart enough in many cases. If you want to do modern things in the modern world, you're expected to run specific apps that may or may not run at all unless you have vanilla Android on your phone. Did you run into issues like that?

The author doesn't say it happens on phones

that’s right, Windows users won’t even notice it as the OS already takes 97% of memory when idle

Agreed. Hate the data centers and corporate obsession with extreme waste for total value capture. Not the tech, especially on a local scale.

A 128GB amd strix halo runs at 120W and can host large LLMs at home. If you ran it full time for inference it would still be under $20/mo in electricity costs.

I'd say you should read the article a little more closely, but it's not written very well. But it brings up interesting things that have nothing to do with your local GPU usage. For example, it names an interesting point about simply delivering 4 gigabytes of data to that many people. If pushed out to ~15% of Chrome users without consent:

• That'd be 500 million people
• It would be 2 exabytes of data
• 120 GWh of energy, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 36,000 average UK households
• 30,000 tonnes CO2 emitted, roughly the annual emissions of 6,500 cars

And that's just for the initial data push. Models need ✨updates!✨

AFAIK Chromium is almost the same and doesn't have this.

🤑 I wonder what could possibly be driving their decisions?

quarterly earnings reports.

End stage capitalism.

The real meat in the article is the total abuse of every machine installed to. Illegal abuse. No consent. Hiding the evidence, reinstalling if it gets removed. And he barely touches the other concern, how once there AI will be used for anything you do on Chrome. The download impact is the least of the crimes here, but no one seemed to read the rest of the article.

downloading? the clear issue is running a billion mini geminis nobody asked for

The real issue is waste of backup medium space IMO.

The linked page accesses at least 10 other sites for scripts, and is more than 2 MB big. It could have been a 458 byte page:

Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:

0. Backup registry
1. Start
2. regedit
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
4. right-click Policies, New, Key
5. confirm Google, Enter
6. right-click Google, New, Key
7. confirm Chrome, Enter
8. right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
9. confirm GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings, Enter
10. right-click newly created key, Modify
11. set value to 1
12. OK
13. Restart computer.

I am pretty sure that the main way how how to remove it is to uninstall chrome, but i also think that if you cared, you wouldn't be using chrome in the first place

The download is the title and what everyone is latching onto, but few are seeing the other problems, like how it secretly installed that model without user acceptance, how it uses obscurity to hide the model, how it will reinstall if you just delete it (fortunately there's an uninstall process linked in the comments, does that include uninstalling Chrome?). And then how it pretends to be an extra AI thing on the browser but apparently will be used for any searching. Which is more energy use since it isn't local, it's just using the weights in storage.

It's all bad, even if it wasn't AI. It's what malware does.

I don't buy this energy figure at all - where are you getting it from?

120 GWh / 500 million is 240 Wh per person.
The download is 4GB. Downloaded over a 100 megabit connection, it takes about 5 minutes.
240 Wh / 5 minutes is 2.88 kW.

What equipment is consuming an extra 2.88 kW due to me downloading something?

This sounds like one of those pants-on-head "calculations" about how sending an email consumes five billion gigajoules or whatever. They typically add up the energy usage of a data centre and divide by the number of emails going through it. Is that what's happening here?

Isn’t local machine learning better than shipping your data off to some cloud provider?

They're absolutely shipping all your local data up to their cloud.

If you read the article it will summarize very succinctly everything wrong with it. It is illegal for a variety of reasons in some places (Europe, California) it's wasteful, it means 4 fucking GB of data unrequested which can be a problem in metered connections in many places. 4GB. This model is not essential for chrome to function as a browser at all, and in all likelihood unless you use it for generating text then you probably are not even using it.

Per Passerby6497's comment above:

The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing by Google's hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in , tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.

What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.

The problem, mostly, is that it is installed without informing the user or asking for content and it reinstalls even if you delete it, which is what a malware does. I may not want a local AI work on my laptop on battery while I am working and browsing the internet.

Their absolute disregard for any form of consent is a hell of a flag on so many levels

In Linux btw its still your own device