> Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices.

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.

> You are conflating disk and memory.

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