Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.

Your word might be of petabytes of traffic. Some people have slow lines. Some people have metered Internet subscriptions.

Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.

I do not agree: I live by the sea and this is exactly the answer I get when I talk about trash in the sea. I personally appreciate even more that kind of "stretch" then the privacy one (which could be another "stretch" on getting closer to 1984 scenario)

Chrome is used by about 3.8 billion people [1]. So, if this is rolled out to every chrome user over the next year or two, this would generate about 15 Exabytes of traffic. It's difficult to find accurate, useful numbers on this, but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB, this would be about 450k tons of CO2e. This in turn, equates to average household CO2 expenditure of almost 300k households.

So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.

[1]: https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/ [2]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... [3]: https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-ton...

What is a lot of traffic to you?

2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic.

I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.

Whilst I am sceptical about Google in this space I do think it is a move in the right direction to do more locally and actually use the space modern machines have on device.

Amazing how many people missed the "environmental disaster" part of this post and are talking about personal inconvenience.

Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.

The same old individualistic fallacy [1] of highlighting individual effects to hide global effects, all while compromising user privacy. In reality this will be continuous million of devices downloading these useless weight files.

[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.

60.000.000 kg ÷ 1.000.000.000 user

is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?

There are multiple problems here.

For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.

The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.

4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?

I would more worry about storage space on some laptops with pretty small SSDs like 192-256GB of official capacity prior installing Windows, 4GB of that is already pretty significant part of storage space for something which should be opt-in.

What is petabytes if not 4GB at Chrome userbase scale?

Agreed, my eyes rolled hard at that. Definitely more of an F-U to users with bad connections than anything else.

The next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)

Its unsollicited. Not everyone has fiber either