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by cachius 36 days ago
The problem here is that the on-device model is old news packed as clickbait without any research beyond his file system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034889 And all news outlets spreading it w/o any further research of their own.

Policy GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings disables and removes the local model without any flag hacks since 2024. In Canary since January behind Settings > System > On-device AI

The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered.

1 comments

> The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered.

Actually, it does claim this is the stable release channel. And it's reasonable to assume that if the author is documenting on a fresh profile / user account on the Mac, they probably downloaded the current (that day) release, though we're inferring when don't don't truly know for sure.

> 10. Code-signed, shipped through the normal release channel. This is not test build behaviour. It is Chrome stable.

I think it's poor form to run cover for one of the biggest corporations in the world like this. Don't let them off the hook. As the author correctly points out, metered connections are being abused. Hell, last month I somehow hit ATT's bandwidth limits on my mobile and got throttled for five days. It made my phone so unusable that I turned on hotspot on my work phone and connected to that over wifi when I went to lunch.