[brody_hamer]

A few weeks ago I noticed some mysterious app was killing my (poor) internet downloading a large file.

It was chrome, downloading a multi GB file without any sort of UI hints that it was doing so. A generative AI file.

Is this why chrome uses so much ram? They’ve just been pushing up the memory usage in preparation for this day, hoping I wouldn’t notice the extra software now running on my (old, outdated) system?

[satvikpendem]

It's an AI model file, part of an upcoming local AI API. It can be very useful for on-device AI though, stuff like parsing and analyzing text from an image such as a receipt of groceries, which is actually an app I'm making currently, so it helps if everyone has such a model.

[moregrist]

It would be absolutely lovely if Google asked users to opt-in rather than force a large file download on them.

I’m going to attribute this to stupidity instead of malice, but it’s pretty much the height of SV arrogance to assume that unannounced multi-GB files are okay for any purpose, let alone generative AI that the user hasn’t opted into.

Some people still have shitty internet and/or bandwidth caps.

[g947o]

This is why I use Firefox. In case where I have to use something chromium based (because Cloudflare hates Firefox, apparently), I use Brave.

[Retr0id]

Firefox also downloads and uses AI models: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models

[fc417fc802]

I don't believe it ever does so without first asking for permission?

[fady0]

It did it without my permission, it's a small model to rename and group tabs, though, no more than 50M in size.

[fragmede]

wait, hang on, I can't be the only person with 300 tabs open for whom that would actually be useful

[mghackerlady]

Use seamonkey or palemoon

[syockit]

Does seamonkey still work on modern internet? Last time I tried it to open Notion, nothing was displayed. Works great on old world stuff though.

[mghackerlady]

It should, it has some issue rendering some sites (Google's AI overview acted funny but if you still use google you aren't their intended audience anyway) but otherwise works fine on content focused sites. Youtube works iirc, idk about adblock though (theres uBlock legacy but that hasn't been updated in a bit)

[nehal3m]

Interesting. Do you have more specifics? I don't use Chrome or it's derivatives, but this is the first I've heard of it doing that.

[senko]

Chrome can run small[0] models and can auto-download them: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

[0] "small" in comparison to ChatGPT, but still a bulky download

[adzm]

Yeah, seems to be about 4gb or so in disk space for the models in my situation.

[princevegeta89]

Don't ever use Chrome. Go for Brave or Vivaldi, they're far better than Chrome.

[tapland]

Doesn’t Brave has their own ‘Leo’ AI built in?

[princevegeta89]

Yeah but I never use it. Also you can disable it easily.

[anthk]

Those are propietary, actually as worse as Chrome if not more.