Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage | Hacker News Reader

Chrome's AI features may be hogging 4GB of your computer storage

theverge.com

117 pointsbirdculture59 comments

The local model powers the features nobody uses. The cloud model powers the feature everyone sees. You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.

>You pay 4GB for the illusion of privacy.

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.

> They're going to want some sort of analysis

And I want $1 billion dollars.

Doesn’t mean someone’s going to give it to me.

Email me your bank details and I’ll send the money

Point is, nobody is going to be like "wow, chrome is eating up 4GB of my disk space? I totally trust it now!"

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.

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.

I am beginning to suspect Google is mass-sniffing on us here. Then it suddenly makes sense that the blob gathers everything.

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?

From 5 days ago, 1138 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219

I am scared to even open Chrome these days. The only app that randomly chunks 70% of CPU availability with one tab.

I had wondered if this was actually a bug and not intentional:

> When a user downloads or updates Chrome, Gemini Nano is downloaded on demand to ensure Chrome downloads the correct model for the user's hardware. The initial model download is triggered by the first call to a *.create() function (for example, Summarizer.create()) of any built-in AI API that depends on Gemini Nano.

This sounds like it could be possible that some part of Chrome, or perhaps a privileged website (ie; google.com), could be invoking `*.create()` 100% of the time? I don't actually know that this is what's going on or even if it's likely mind you.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/understand-built-in-mod...

It is also quite ironic that one of the docs pages is titled "Inform users of model download" although it goes on to talk about notifying in terms of model download time, not necessarily getting user consent:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/inform-users-of-model-d...

Hogging? This is a dvd worth of data on systems that likely store 200 times that while Microsoft delivers 20 gb updates that they just leave duplicates of laying around. People are really acting like storage is precious… it’s not 1995. Uninstall the software if you don’t like it. Chrome isn’t the only browser…

I might be more inclined to be understanding of this conversation if it was related to mobile phones, but desktops? I get that people think it should be opt-in, and I’m on the fence. There is also a simple way to disable on-device AI features. Outside of the “we never want AI” crowd, which fine whatever, I don’t get this weird focus on a 4gb in size. Maybe I’m just old and remember what it was like for disk space to actually be precious.

And Claude is hogging 12G for Cowork which I don’t want.

That’s mostly because it’s an Electron app. It would be a fraction of that if it were a native app on macOS or Windows.

This is more likely referring to the VM disk image the feature allocates, which would have little to do with Electron.

Well Electron includes Chromium. Maybe that pulls the 4GB model as well… not sure if it is Chrome only.

This, the vm bundle which reappears after you delete it. They say it's For Cowork and Claude Code, but if you don't use Cowork or CC sandboxing, it has no value. Considering I'm always finding things to delete on apples anaemic 512gb because I run out of space.

It's possible to get rid of it. Just delete the VM Bundle file(s) and add `"secureVmFeaturesEnabled": false` to your `claude_desktop_config.json`.

You can find more info here: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/22543#issue...

Doesn’t seem to work for windows ?.

That was the first thing I did, it still recreated it. Surprisingly

But maybe that was a me error and worth a second shot.

I recently switched to Safari, I'm actually very impressed by how well it works.

I would love to use Safari more, but unfortunately Facebook Messenger and similar ilk (maybe all messaging apps?) seems to be completely busted on it.

messenger.com won't allow new sessions on any browsers afaik. https://www.facebook.com/messages works fine

This is what finally pushed me into using Brave.

4GB should be nothing.

It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

Ironically, the AI datacenter boom is also buying up all the storage.

Is that true? It feels wrong. Consumer grade SSDs and spinning disks are unlikely to be the products used in enterprise.

AI companies bought up all the NAND manufacturing capacity, limiting the available manufacturing capacity for consumer products. These data centers also use hard drives for some of their data storage.

Look at SSD prices over the last 6 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/

I reckon until the recent ai-gobbles-everything-up phenomena, this was mainly an Apple problem. Even fairly budget PCs come with at least 1tb of storage. Considering much beyond 2tb NAND gets scary pricing wise, I'm not that surprised we don't see much beyond that.

Yes, but I don't think it was just Apple. The switch to charge trap based SSD storage set all pre-built consumer computers back a full decade in terms of storage size. We were only just getting back beyond 2010 levels when the megacorps started buying up all the flash fab capacity and now even most of the HDD plates are going to enterprise.

A full decade is a bit of an exaggeration. Not just in terms of storage capacity but especially when you consider than switching from HDDs to SSDs was a massive leap in performance for PCs and laptops.

There's no debating the performance. Charge trap flash makes computing so much better. It's just a shame things went SSD only. It really isn't an exaggeration when it comes to actual storage space available per prebuilt.

I don’t know what pre-builts you’ve seen, but when I bought 2 middle-range laptops 5 years ago, all the models were between 500GB to 1TB of storage.

And it’s not a trap when most people aren’t going to fill 5TB of storage with their accounts spreadsheets but they are going to notice the performance difference between an SSD and a HDD.

Yep. 500GB-1000GB is 2010 level of storage. And I in my experience they fill it up with photos and videos and then move onto unreliable, expensive, slow externals.

This was mostly an Apple problem. 1TB SSDs were dirt cheap until the last 6 months when AI bought them all up.

A lot of entry-level laptops from other manufacturers also had small SSDs, and Windows already consumed a large fraction of that limited storage.

It is nothing. This whole fiasco is being blown way out of proportion when there are a hundred other issues with Chrome that we could be complaining about.

We're at 2021 prices, but ok.

I've got a cheap chromebook I take when traveling with 32gb ssd... 4gb is a huge chunk of that. But it doesn't matter as it constantly complains to me about no space available.

>It's crazy to me how consumer computer storage has stalled out at the 2010 level for so long. And if anything we're going backwards now in 2026. We should be having many TBs in our home computers and laptops. Instead most users are still stuck with 256GB and trying to tetris around to fit even their average amount of small data.

Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster storage and everyone chose speed.

> Well we got to the point where you can have 8TB of slow storage or 256GB of faster storage and everyone chose speed.

In 2014-2015, $100 would get you either 3TB of hard drive or 256GB of SSD.

In 2023-2024, $100 would get you 2TB of SSD. (For a few months even 3TB.)

So yeah everyone chose the speed option, but the speed option should have kept growing. Outside of bargain basement models 1-2TB should have become the minimum size.

I couldn't care less about this, it's not in the top 1 million problems. If this is an issue for you, seriously re-evaluate how you spend your time.

Positive reinforcement anyone :) Anyway to me, 4G seems a bit lite for AI.

I always avoided Chrome as much as possible, now I have a real reason to do so.

I wonder if Chromium-based browsers is or will do the same?

Chrome takes up a few gigs on windows for no good reason anyway, mostly caching of websites you went to one time

Did anyone extract these weights so we can run Gemini Nano locally? Is it better than Gemma 4?

Google is abusing people here.

I don't want that AI crap on my computer. This is like a trojan horse.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019219

Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48050964

First IE, now Chrome. What gets into these companies heads once they get biggest market share? And the people working for these companies. How do you sleep at night bro?

Six figure salaries and stock options?

RSUs. Way simpler taxes.

The new book from lady who worked in Meta summarises it.

yet to see this on any linux system yet. might be windows only so far?

Annoying, but are the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device?

“Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin? Yeah, there are a few.

>> the kind of people still using Chrome really that discerning about what's going on behind the scenes on their device?

> "Still using” the most popular browser in the market by an absolutely huge margin?

The strawman derail notwithstanding, the answer is no. No they do not.

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