Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent

Re:Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your d... by xp84 on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @03:06PM (#48040266)

I agree that the disk usage we're discussing here is especially painful on that hardware, but:

> "just to run a web browser"

I don't even mean to be hyperbolic here, but 'running a web browser' is almost the only purpose of a MacBook Neo for at least 90% of its target audience.

Consider what normal people do on a laptop:

- Email - web browser

- Social media - web browser

- pay bills, research, book trips - web browser

- watch video content - web browser

For many users, you could hide the Dock and just autolaunch Chrome at Startup and it wouldn't have any negative impact on them.

And I'd bet that any browser with more than 5 tabs open, especially without an adblocker, is using whatever portion of its paltry 8GB of RAM that the OS hasn't hogged. So the argument to be made for allowing some feature bloat (and paying the space cost) in a browser is that this is probably the app most people will spend 75-100% of their time in anyway.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your d... by danudey on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @06:07PM (#48042533)

Running a web browser _with a local AI model_ is likely something that most users are not aiming for. This is extra disk and bandwidth for something that benefits Google but does nothing for the average user.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your d... by kjs3 on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @06:52PM (#48042955)

And most users won't know and don't care. Doesn't make it right, or good, but it is true.

[ Parent | on HN ]