Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
I was thinking the same thing. The article claims 30,000 to 60,000 tons of CO2e emissions from sending 4GB of data to hundreds of millions of phones. For reference, estimates for the US AI industry’s emissions are between 30 and 80 million tons per year, global total emissions are 80 billion. How often this gets repeated for new versions is unclear.
As for inference, Chrome won’t even use it for its biggest use case: everything done via the search bar and “AI mode” is still sent to high-param models in Google’s servers, likely because user data is Alphabet’s cash cow. The local model is only used in very niche cases:
the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
I was thinking the same thing. The article claims 30,000 to 60,000 tons of CO2e emissions from sending 4GB of data to hundreds of millions of phones. For reference, estimates for the US AI industry’s emissions are between 30 and 80 million tons per year, global total emissions are 80 billion. How often this gets repeated for new versions is unclear.
As for inference, Chrome won’t even use it for its biggest use case: everything done via the search bar and “AI mode” is still sent to high-param models in Google’s servers, likely because user data is Alphabet’s cash cow. The local model is only used in very niche cases: