I'm struggling to understand why anyone would think Google is doing this for user's privacy. I admit I haven't dug into what's going on here in detail, but my first reaction was Google is running a small model on the user's side because it's doing things that _can_ be done on the user side and they don't want to waste their own compute to do it on their server side. I'm pretty sure whatever this thing is doing, Google can easily beam up some small amount of data, have a model churn on it and spit back the result to the user's browser. But why do all that if you can just run some small inference on the user's device?
How's this conspiracy supposed to work? A technical audience who cares about privacy aren't going to be placated by 4GB sitting on their disk. They're going to want some sort of analysis (like http interception), or probably not use chrome in the first place. A non-technical audience isn't going to make the association between 4GB of disk usage and the privacy implications.
1. I've got a Chrome local model stored on my drive
2. I see a heavily promoted "AI search" box in chrome
Natural Conclusion: when I use all the promoted AI features in chrome it's using the local AI model. This is not true; Google is being intentionally misleading.
I suspect the type of person who is even aware of this 4GB blob is the type of person who would research its usage. Pretty high venn diagram crossover.
Yeah. The fictional user doesn’t know anything about AI but knows about this 4gb file…because of news stories about how bad a 4gb file must be. Outside of that, they don’t know or care and wonder if that means that need to add some more “memory” to their computer.
That misses the point of the original commenter. He is saying that local model only powers things where privacy is not so relevant and that creates the illusion.