Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size.

rodneylives@mefi.social

@xgqt @mgorny @atoponce I've had phones where this would be one-eighth of its storage.

rodneylives@mefi.social

@bontchev @atoponce one company does a bad thing, so other company doing a similar bad thing is nothing

w6kme@mastodon.radio

@veronica @atoponce And with very little effort, and no need for advanced knowledge. It's a great option.

mat@activitypub.mnethome.de

@atoponce it's so easy to deactivate it - just uninstall Chrome! You all should have done it long time ago!

feld@friedcheese.us

@atoponce

> At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

this is just blind LLM outrage. Yes it's a waste of storage and network that nobody consented to. It's not guaranteed to make people use more CPU as they have to interact with whatever feature this is going to empower. But it's *only* 4GB.

Please write an article about the climate costs of internet ads. This is about a trillion times more wasteful and nobody consents to it. It wastes so much CPU and you could literally calculate the damage to batteries of mobile devices caused by this unwanted, unsolicited, uninvited compute.

xgqt@functional.cafe

@rodneylives @mgorny @atoponce

I still have a backup phone like that

hal8999@infosec.exchange

@atoponce Is this news? It's over a year old. IIRC, it's designed to reduce the amount of data sent off-machine. They were talking about space consumption in Canary release in Feb of 2025 (https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chrome-ai-dev-preview-discuss/c/PhgjQg4IoQk)

Looking for all the models that have been downloaded for cache in browser, it's not just limited to one. chrome://on-device-internals/

You can use the Tools tab to 'Load Default' model, then type your prompt in the box below. It's slower than a cloud-based response.

Ask 'how to spell "incorriggable" and it takes 2 seconds to spit out: The correct spelling is incorrigible.

Takes 10 more seconds to explain each part of the word.

Then it crashes.

I'd rather handle spell checks on-box than send every word up to a cloud service.

But, don't ask it what the range of radio delay is between the earth and the moon. Highest Quality says 2.5 milliseconds, and crashes. Fastest inference says 22 seconds, and crashes. Not usable.

tbachner@ruhr.social

@atoponce Which OS? Chrome under Linux affected?

atoponce@fosstodon.org

@tbachner It's not for me which I installed via Flatpak. I've left Chrome running for the past few hours and executed:

% find / -type f -name weights.bin 2> /dev/random

a couple times, with no results.

However, @ferricoxide found it on their machine in ~/.config/google-chrome/

YMMV.

ferricoxide@blahaj.zone

@atoponce@fosstodon.org @tbachner@ruhr.social

Yeah. I'm using an EL9 derivative (via WSL). Looks like I installed the portable installer (i.e., it lives under ${HOME}/firefox/) rather than from RPM, though. A little odd for my habits, but I can't remember why I did it that way.

beemdvp@techhub.social

@atoponce AI infra companies cannot seriously get away with pulling shit like this surely

toychicken@mastodon.social

@atoponce question seems to be why? If the weights are sitting on your machine, but the ai functionality is still calling home... Is this some weird distributed AI alternative to building data centres? Using your users processing downtime to answer Gemini queries _elsewhere_?

radhitya@navi.lain.day

@atoponce the heck 🫩.

kennethbousquet@mastodon.social

@atoponce@fosstodon.orgMy thoughts on this would be to write a script that installs in MBR,
At boot time,
With no date limit,
Forensics Tools...
The script that will block such request in the future.
If you are worried about the coding process, AI is Excellent in the helping.