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Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent — That Privacy Guy!
(www.thatprivacyguy.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Technology
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Unnecessarily long article (which says "4GB" 33 times, and the complete phrase "4GB AI model" ten times)... Once or twice was all I needed.
But the article author(s) came across a good point. If pushed out to ~15% of Chrome users without consent:
And that's just for the initial data push. Models need ✨updates!✨
The download is the title and what everyone is latching onto, but few are seeing the other problems, like how it secretly installed that model without user acceptance, how it uses obscurity to hide the model, how it will reinstall if you just delete it (fortunately there's an uninstall process linked in the comments, does that include uninstalling Chrome?). And then how it pretends to be an extra AI thing on the browser but apparently will be used for any searching. Which is more energy use since it isn't local, it's just using the weights in storage.
It's all bad, even if it wasn't AI. It's what malware does.
I don't buy this energy figure at all - where are you getting it from?
120 GWh / 500 million is 240 Wh per person.
The download is 4GB. Downloaded over a 100 megabit connection, it takes about 5 minutes.
240 Wh / 5 minutes is 2.88 kW.
What equipment is consuming an extra 2.88 kW due to me downloading something?
This sounds like one of those pants-on-head "calculations" about how sending an email consumes five billion gigajoules or whatever. They typically add up the energy usage of a data centre and divide by the number of emails going through it. Is that what's happening here?