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Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsI might be more inclined to be understanding of this conversation if it was related to mobile phones, but desktops? I get that people think it should be opt-in, and I’m on the fence. There is also a simple way to disable on-device AI features. Outside of the “we never want AI” crowd, which fine whatever, I don’t get this weird focus on a 4gb in size. Maybe I’m just old and remember what it was like for disk space to actually be precious.
> When a user downloads or updates Chrome, Gemini Nano is downloaded on demand to ensure Chrome downloads the correct model for the user's hardware. The initial model download is triggered by the first call to a *.create() function (for example, Summarizer.create()) of any built-in AI API that depends on Gemini Nano.
This sounds like it could be possible that some part of Chrome, or perhaps a privileged website (ie; google.com), could be invoking `*.create()` 100% of the time? I don't actually know that this is what's going on or even if it's likely mind you.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/understand-built-in-mod...
It is also quite ironic that one of the docs pages is titled "Inform users of model download" although it goes on to talk about notifying in terms of model download time, not necessarily getting user consent:
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/inform-users-of-model-d...
I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse.
I always avoided Chrome as much as possible, now I have a real reason to do so.
I wonder if Chromium-based browsers is or will do the same?
It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.
Related:
Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers