Which apparently means it'll never install btw, even if I were to run Chrome. Another comment said they check for 22GB free space
4gb definitely isn’t a negligible amount of space on most people’s devices.
The quite successful it would seem MacBook Neo has 256GB of storage in its base configuration.
A MacBook Air and a basic sub $1000 Dell laptop starts at 512GB.
> To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 tabs open that nearly take up 4gb.
You are conflating disk and memory.
> The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion.
There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.
But I also see the point in it. We recently did a hackathon, and I considered relying on Gemma 4 for privacy considerations. The local model could interpret the user’s natural language request and derive less privacy revealing requests to form based on that.
But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.
I never conflated anything. I said it's a neglible amount of space for current hardware, which I still believe.
If anything, the fact that I think the amount of space is acceptable for the amount of ram a modern laptop has exaggerates the point.
> There’s a reason they picked an opt-out model for this, and not an opt-in approach.
That's the approach they take for most of their features.
> But then, a web app that shows people a loading screen while it downloads a 4GB model probably wouldn’t be a best-selling UX.
Which seems to be the motivation of having these local models embedded in the browser's available resources: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api