@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.

@pauldrye It seems toggling chrome://settings/system -> On-device AI does the trick.

@johnkavs It's unaffected. This is only Google Chrome bloat.

@faduda A possible solution might be toggling chrome://settings/system -> On-device AI, although I haven't been able to confirm, as the 4 GB weights.bin file hasn't shown up on my install yet.

And no, this is strictly Google Chrome browser bloat. It doesn't affect Chromium, Edge, Brave, or any of the other Chromium forks as I understand it.

@ferricoxide Thanks. It appears to be ~/.var/app/com.google.Chrome/config/google-chrome/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/ for me as I have it installed via Flatpak, but the weights.bin file hasn't showed up yet.

I wonder if Flatpak is getting in the way here, or if it's getting installed somewhere else.

@ferricoxide I still haven't seen it show up in my home dir. What's the directory path for you?

@6al AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/UserData/OptGuideOnDeviceModel/ is the directory.

I believe chrome://settings/system -> On-device AI is the toggle for this, but I can't confirm as I haven't seen the download reach my system yet.

@msbellows I believe the toggle is chrome://settings/system "On-device AI".

I can't confirm this though, as in my testing on Linux, I haven't been able to locate the "weights.bin" download and no directory size supports that 4 GB download.

So either I haven't waited long enough to download it (it's been over an hour at this point), or it's not applicable to Linux.

Google Chrome is silently installing a local LLM on your computer that is 4 gigabytes in size. It's done without consent, it's not visible in the settings, and removing it will reinstall it later.

https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install/