You can stop Chrome from taking up 4GB of storage for local AI, but that shouldn't be your problem.
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No, Google hasn’t changed Chrome’s local AI features—it’s just as confusing as ever
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People have got to stop feeding the Chrome and Chrome-clone browser dominance. Google can do whatever the fuck they want with Chrome because people won't change browsers.
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For anyone using MacOS this is how you can find the model and nuke it if you wish (I did it yesterday):
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1t536x6/psa_chrome_silently_downloaded_a_4gb_ai_model_on/
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1t536x6/psa_chrome_silently_downloaded_a_4gb_ai_model_on/
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I'm not sure that I believe that. When GMail first rolled out, they promised that they wouldn't use your email info, and look where we are now.
I fully expect that Google will slip another switch in somewhere (or maybe just change the terms and conditions) so that they can send your "anonymized" data to the cloud for their use, and I expect that it will happen within five years.
When a company builds its entire business on extracting your data to sell to others, it would be foolish to think that they would exclude any of their products from that behavior.
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"... the company has done a poor job of explaining what it’s doing and why. This is, unfortunately, par for the course with Google’s AI efforts"
You could remove the "AI" from that statement, with no loss of accuracy.
You could remove the "AI" from that statement, with no loss of accuracy.
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The lack of detail plus the "randomness" of nano AI being enabled without your permission is the issue. If Google had to put a pop-up that asked the user to download/enable nano AI, I would wager at least half would say no. And that's the issue; Google knows people will say no if given an option, so they hide it.
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Oh, could we? I've been wanting to flip off Google for years.
And as for the wording change, I agree that in 2026 all processing will be done on-device. In 2027, however, all bets are off...
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Yes, almost no one will. But most people are on mobile, and for work computers you would think IT Deps would disable by default, if they are paying attn (not likely).
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Like most folks from the early days of CRT's and Windows numbers starting with a 9, I started using Explorer, and hated it. I found Navigator to be better for me. Then Navigator went away for a bit, and I was stuck with fucking Exploder. Then along came a red panda insignia and Firefox.
I have not changed since there.
There was a VERY short time when Chrome played streaming videos from Netflix better, but Firefox was fixed, and I uninstalled Chrome after that. I would not use Exploder. I fucking hated that program.
Over time, I added addons that I use constantly and daily - only a handful, and most of the privacy related - NoScript, uBlock Origin, CookieBro to dump site cookies before I leave them, and a few others that facilitate my needs. Some are available in Chrome, but not all. But Firefox does something Chrome doesn't: It facilitates your privacy. Chrome invades it.
Three years ago, I switched to Linux for everything, and Firefox was up and running with all of my extensions and data in nothing flat. That was seamless, and easy. Chrome is offered for Linux, but I won't install it for the same reasons I didn't have it in my Windows machines. It's just a data privacy nightmare.
It's also very easy to get your data from one browser to the other. It may take some (ironically) googling to do that. But if you want out of the cesspool Google is making of your data, there are ways to do that pretty easily, if one makes a modest effort. I highly recommend it. It's simple to get used to a new paradigm. But you won't get back your privacy until you become more proactive doing it.
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I don't mind AI - but with the tiny size of SSDs these days, that is a major hit to my disk space.
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There are lots of others....that are all Chrom(ium)e. And then there's Firefox/LibreWolf and Safari.
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Chromium (not chrome) or Ungoogled Chromium are the way for chromium-based, Firefox (or Libre Wolf) being preferred to either.
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i love mr lawson's work, but i think it should have been a golden shower -- appropriate for the subject matter of the article, appropriate for these times in tech.
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Yes, running these models on device without uploading to Google's servers is preferable to sharing everything, but they absolutely should have asked us a long time ago for permission to use the models in ANY form.
The miscommunication reminds me of the Sony scandal a week or so ago. It was a tempest in a teacup really, but it was all caused by Sony making a change without communicating it to anyone in advance. What happened was everyone noticed new purchases had a 30 day online check-in requirement. This felt like the sort of draconian measure we're all nervously expecting one of these companies to spring on us, and after testing in the only way we could, battery removal to reset the clock and see what happened, it did appear to make the games stop working after the system had been off for that period of time.
As it turned out, it was a rather heavy handed solution Sony felt the need to come up with in the face of some piracy. People had figured out how to use the refund period to get a free game, by downloading a game, refunding it on the store, and playing it as long as they wished on an offline system that hadn't synced to realize the purchase was invalid. The check-in was there, but it was one time, and it was removed after the refund grace period had ended (14 days). Basically, all this meant in practice was that so long as you could maintain an internet connection for the next two weeks, the game would work offline forever more past that point. Understandable, if regrettable, but Sony NEVER told anyone about any of this, and we were all left twisting in the wind making what was frankly a reasonable assumption based on all the information we had. Of course, eventually the PS5's servers will go down. In the long term, I hope Sony realize that they need to make sure to turn off purchasing a month before the servers go dark altogether, or those last few purchases made in a flurry before it all goes dark (there tend to be a rush of them at these moments, historically), will all just stop working with no server to check in home to any more.
The miscommunication reminds me of the Sony scandal a week or so ago. It was a tempest in a teacup really, but it was all caused by Sony making a change without communicating it to anyone in advance. What happened was everyone noticed new purchases had a 30 day online check-in requirement. This felt like the sort of draconian measure we're all nervously expecting one of these companies to spring on us, and after testing in the only way we could, battery removal to reset the clock and see what happened, it did appear to make the games stop working after the system had been off for that period of time.
As it turned out, it was a rather heavy handed solution Sony felt the need to come up with in the face of some piracy. People had figured out how to use the refund period to get a free game, by downloading a game, refunding it on the store, and playing it as long as they wished on an offline system that hadn't synced to realize the purchase was invalid. The check-in was there, but it was one time, and it was removed after the refund grace period had ended (14 days). Basically, all this meant in practice was that so long as you could maintain an internet connection for the next two weeks, the game would work offline forever more past that point. Understandable, if regrettable, but Sony NEVER told anyone about any of this, and we were all left twisting in the wind making what was frankly a reasonable assumption based on all the information we had. Of course, eventually the PS5's servers will go down. In the long term, I hope Sony realize that they need to make sure to turn off purchasing a month before the servers go dark altogether, or those last few purchases made in a flurry before it all goes dark (there tend to be a rush of them at these moments, historically), will all just stop working with no server to check in home to any more.
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In terms that may or may not be understandable to anyone not an expert in law / infosec / AI, and which the underlying organization may or may not decide to abandon tomorrow (or outright ignore today), and which are likely to be different for every single place you'd like to visit online.
I'm so sick of this. And I feel like a lot of it comes back to the decision to treat corporations as people and corporate money as political speech and therefore protected (much more than actual people's actual political speech is, it turns out). Unsurprisingly, corporations have a lot more money than people; if they're allowed to use that money to sway policy for their benefit, it'll snowball in a way that's not great for you & me.
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from what i can tell, correct, only Chrome, i do not see the Gemini integration in Chromium. at least, it's not in the GUI (we be talkin' google here...).
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"No one thought to get upset at me when I decided to steal her purse, so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about now..."
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"You can stop Chrome from taking up 4GB of storage for local AI..." indeed I can, by uninstalling the browser entirely.
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How? That's about 1.5 Photoshops, or 7.5 - 10 PTC Creos (a mid-to-high end 3D CAD modeller).
While I'm in there, how is PowerToys 1.7 GB? Are modern devs putting a local copy of Visual Studio or Jetbrains in there?
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Gecko or WebKit.
I wouldn't call WebKit niche. Everyone with an iOS device is using it.
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A little help here...
I've got Chrome v147 installed. Under the "System" tab of the settings page, there are only three options: background apps, graphics acceleration, and system notifications. I don't see any option for "On-device AI".
Does this mean that Chrome decided I or my computer are not worthy of running AI, and so none of this stuff about the downloading of the AI model applies to me and my computer?
Or am I just looking in the wrong place?
I've got Chrome v147 installed. Under the "System" tab of the settings page, there are only three options: background apps, graphics acceleration, and system notifications. I don't see any option for "On-device AI".
Does this mean that Chrome decided I or my computer are not worthy of running AI, and so none of this stuff about the downloading of the AI model applies to me and my computer?
Or am I just looking in the wrong place?
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they stopped digging through gmail for ad info about a decade-ish ago. my guess is that all spam emails made it not worth the effort.
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Blink is fork of webkit and they are still close enough that they share some patches
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They forked over a decade ago.
But it doesn't matter when they forked really. They're different, they report as different, and Google doesn't really contribute to WebKit anymore, so using WebKit over a chrome clone means taking away from Blink's web dominance.
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I haven't read up on this API, but would it be possible to do evil things? Like mine for Bitcoins? Or perhaps distributed hash cracking for bad actors?
When local computing power gives access to any site on the web, one should be cautious on who has access to that power.
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This is the sort of article I come to Ars for. Thank you.
I read an article about this a few days ago, and have seen numerous similar headlines since. Apparently none of those authors bothered to do real reporting on the topic, just parrot other articles. If it was not for Ars I would continue to be misinformed.
I read an article about this a few days ago, and have seen numerous similar headlines since. Apparently none of those authors bothered to do real reporting on the topic, just parrot other articles. If it was not for Ars I would continue to be misinformed.
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and Firefox has its own privacy issues.
https://meincmagazine.com/tech-policy...r-sell-personal-data-asks-users-not-to-panic/
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You mean that they have altered the deal.
Perhaps you should pray they will not alter it further.
https://gifdb.com/images/high/darth-vader-altering-the-deal-i0qkrtvj5uah6b1a.webp
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There's already an API for general purpose compute, though. It's called "JavaScript." It'd be a better fit than an AI API.
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While I like Firefox, even switching to a different Chromium browser solves this.
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I haven't used Chrome regularly in years, but it has apparently become even more of storage hog than I remember. My Vivaldi install on my Linux desktop is under 500 MB, and the cache folder is only 2.2 GB, and I probably haven't cleared the cache in a year.
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It's definitely different on different devices. On my personal Windows 11 desktop I do have the "On-Device AI" option under System. on my personal M2 Mac Mini no such option. On my Windows 11 work laptop No "On-Device AI" option either although that is managed by my internal IT.
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