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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 2 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.radio to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[+] Skv@lemmy.world -7 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (2 children)

Huh? What's the name of it then? My Chrome is but an .exe with 4mb to it and I don't see any 4GB....

Edit: From Article, "Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]"

So, morons who installed shitty AI are getting AI shafted - makes ALL the sense to me.

[–] desertdruid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 17 hours ago

You should not be calling anyone a moron if you think that .exe actually contains Google Chrome

[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago

It's stated in the second paragraph:

This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.

Its a separate file (as any 4GB download would be).