I mean the easiest solution is to not use chrome. If you are into G-Daddy’s kinky party basement though I think it’s still an experimental feature and you can turn the flag off. Or at least it was like that a few days ago.
I’ve heard conflicting information lately. This website seemed to have the best so I thought to share. lol
Right on. I figure it’s likely only a matter of time before it moved from experimental to production
tldr?
Google is making your personal computer do work for them, without asking.
Oh, like BOINC? I loved SETI@home and the protein folding projects for medical research!
Wait, you mean mandatory, secret distributed computing just to offload expense from an insatiable mega-conglomerate to its
usersproducts? GTFOooooooooo…I hate this timeline.
Those days were so filled with optimism and wonder.
I haven’t thought about the project in a long time, it looks like it’s still alive and well.
It is! (Or they are!)
Unfortunately (IMHO) they switched to requiring GPU, rather than CPU, processing some time back - for understandable reasons - and that makes the power consumption an issue.
No longer can you do screensaver/idle or shared use without your GPU pegging at 100% while the fans imitate jet engines (the last time I checked). 😟
Google is using chrome to put a 3gb AI file on people’s computer silently. This reports what they’re doing and how to disable it if one is using chrome.
And the lesson the chrome users should learn? Stop using chrome.
4GB*
People shouldn’t be using Chrome in the first place.
Google is using chrome to put a 3gb AI file on people’s computer silently.
It makes a good clickbait story but it’s just not true that this was some sort of secret project sprung on people at the last minute, they’ve been loudly announcing their AI integration in the browser for quite some time.
For example:
Announcement video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56b9uHAcHYc
Blog post: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-mode-chrome/
Developer documentation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
And product page: https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/
An article from 5/14/2024 explaining to developers how to integrate the AI into extensions, including an early preview version of the browser with local AI: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/client-side
The local AI integration for Chrome has been public for over 2 years. They’ve spent money advertising it, wrote about it on their blog, and provided documentation for developers.
The story is just farming outrage, nobody has cared about this for 2 years but if the author fluffs up the technical details and frames it like they have uncovered some secret plot while also including ‘AI’, then they’re guaranteed to have their article be carried on a wave of outrage and spread all over social media.
I’m not sure loudly announcing it counts when it’s through channels that nobody using Chrome actually looks at… who cares to look at the Google Blog or Chrome Dev Blog/Docs?
Maybe you are a developer so it makes sense you might be looking at those sites, but 99.9% of people wouldn’t have heard about it.
Announcing the change ahead of time through a small popup inside the browser as a startup tab announcement or a new toggle when booting up the new update makes more sense.
That’s just my opinion not knowing much else about this story and specifically talking about your “wasnt silent announcement” point.
This article is taking advantage of the fact that most people don’t know how their software works and framing non-issues so that they sound outrageous because that draws clicks and advertising money.
Most people haven’t heard of most changes made to their browser, even when those changes massively change the Browser (like Manifest v3).
Yes, they could run in-browser announcements for all of these changes but it would just annoy people who don’t care anyway. Nobody wants to see a pop-up every time there’s a browser update full of information that they don’t care about.
This specific change is no different than the multitude of other large changes that get implemented every update. It’s announced far ahead of time (2 years in this case), they have preview builds available for anyone to try, they run advertisements (I’ve seen Google Gemini advertisements before YT videos, for example), they publish documentation.
Like every major change to Chrome, most people don’t care and don’t want to be bothered by it… that’s why they didn’t know about this specific change. Perfectly normal because, as you have said, most people are not developers or computer people so the information is not relevant to them.
However, that is a hugely different scenario than the way these articles are presenting this information.
They’re implying that there is something sinister or secretive about this specific update when the reality is that this information is announced and advertised like every other update that nobody cares to look at. People didn’t know it was happening because they didn’t look, not because Google was doing anything different.
The articles also frame boring technical details in the most breathless way possible. For example:
Hanff focuses on the environmental angle. He calculated that if this model were pushed to just 1 billion Chrome users (roughly 30% of Chrome’s user base), the distribution alone would consume 240 gigawatt-hours of energy and generate 60,000 tons of CO2 equivalent. That’s not including actually using the model, just the downloads.
That sounds crazy and even if the numbers are correct (which nobody can check because how ‘he calculated’ is never explained) they’re describing a 4GB file transfer and multiplying.
It’s 4GB, that’s 10% of a Netflix movie. Describing it with such framing is disingenuous outrage bait.
Here’s another boring technical detail that’s framed in the same outrageous manner:
What happened to asking for permission?
Pretending to be outraged because they were not asked before an update was applied.
Chrome, Windows, Apple’s software, etc all use automatic updates. If the author wanted to to have their permission asked for every update, that’s completely possible and has been since Chrome was first released. Nobody wants 30 different applications asking permission and providing patch notes and so the default is that updates are applied automatically. They had decades to learn about and disable automatic updates. It’s only suddenly a problem when the author needs to farm outrage.
And when I remove it, I want it gone permanently—not automatic reinstallation.
The author is using a browser with the AI features enabled, they go and delete a file required for that feature and then act outraged that it gets put back in place.
The reason that it’s automatically re-installed is because they have the feature enabled in their browser options and Chrome repairs itself when it starts up, that includes re-downloading missing files. The AI feature is enabled and a required file is missing so it re-downloads it.
Most people don’t understand how Chrome works under the hood, and that’s understandable.
However, the person writing the article and the security researcher who ‘discovered’ this certainly know.
They are exploiting people’s ignorance to frame completely normal processes as if they’re something to be outraged about. It’s misinformation using outrage to sell advertisement. It isn’t informing people of anything, it is experts who know better that are deliberately manipulating people for profit.
This is a very common tactic in Technical Support Scams. If you’re on Windows and you open the command prompt and type ‘netstat’ you will see a scary looking list of IP addresses. One of the columns says ‘FOREIGN ADDRESS’.
Tech support scammers will tell people that the foreign address means that people outside the country are connecting to their computer because they have malware and so they need to pay the scammer to fix it.
Obviously that’s nonsense, as any person with the most basic professional understanding of technology will tell you. A foreign address in this context is simply the ip address of some other computer that you’re connected to for various reasons.
But a person who doesn’t know much about computers can be easily fooled by someone misrepresenting this basic technical detail and it happens constantly.
That’s what this article is doing.
