Posted by birdculture 1 day ago
I might be more inclined to be understanding of this conversation if it was related to mobile phones, but desktops? I get that people think it should be opt-in, and I’m on the fence. There is also a simple way to disable on-device AI features. Outside of the “we never want AI” crowd, which fine whatever, I don’t get this weird focus on a 4gb in size. Maybe I’m just old and remember what it was like for disk space to actually be precious.
How's this conspiracy supposed to work? A technical audience who cares about privacy aren't going to be placated by 4GB sitting on their disk. They're going to want some sort of analysis (like http interception), or probably not use chrome in the first place. A non-technical audience isn't going to make the association between 4GB of disk usage and the privacy implications.
Natural Conclusion: when I use all the promoted AI features in chrome it's using the local AI model. This is not true; Google is being intentionally misleading.
And I want $1 billion dollars.
Doesn’t mean someone’s going to give it to me.
> When a user downloads or updates Chrome, Gemini Nano is downloaded on demand to ensure Chrome downloads the correct model for the user's hardware. The initial model download is triggered by the first call to a *.create() function (for example, Summarizer.create()) of any built-in AI API that depends on Gemini Nano.
This sounds like it could be possible that some part of Chrome, or perhaps a privileged website (ie; google.com), could be invoking `*.create()` 100% of the time? I don't actually know that this is what's going on or even if it's likely mind you.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/understand-built-in-mod...
It is also quite ironic that one of the docs pages is titled "Inform users of model download" although it goes on to talk about notifying in terms of model download time, not necessarily getting user consent:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/inform-users-of-model-d...
You can find more info here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543#issue...
But maybe that was a me error and worth a second shot.
I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse.