Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

Holacc

The local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.

superkuh

4GB should be nothing. 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.

zb3

Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?

add-sub-mul-div

Annoying, but are the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device?

jmclnx

Positive reinforcement anyone :) Anyway to me, 4G seems a bit lite for AI. 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?

Weryj

And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.

thunderbong

From 5 days ago, 1138 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219

iamkrazy

First IE, now Chrome. What gets into these companies heads once they get biggest market share? And the people working for these companies. How do you sleep at night bro?

seam_carver

I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.

nicce

I am scared to even open Chrome these days. The only app that randomly chunks 70% of CPU availability with one tab.

shevy-java

Google is abusing people here. I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse.

sethops1

This is what finally pushed me into using Brave.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219 Related: Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964

arkensaw

Chrome takes up a few gigs on windows for no good reason anyway, mostly caching of websites you went to one time

spondyl

I had wondered if this was actually a bug and not intentional: > 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...

senectus1

yet to see this on any linux system yet. might be windows only so far?