Yet there is another post a few rows down where people are losing their shit that Chrome has a local LLM model that uses a couple of GB of space for local-inference.

Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Maybe don't use gigabytes of bandwidth and storage space, without asking.

If I want a model I'll go download one. (And I did, not long ago, to play around with image generation.)

This is a bit disingenuous. People aren't losing their shit about a local model being installed. It's the lack of user autonomy. Just give the option to download a model instead of a silent install. It's not that hard. This is how every other local option works.

This is a weird take. If its not opt in or you’re shoe horning it into a browser, then that sucks. Nobody is getting enraged that an app for running local LLMs downloads data to do so.

You might want to read the comments to understand what people are actually complaining about.

This comment is quite dishonest about the nature of the discussion.

If it was such a good and laudable idea why didn't they tell me about it before they activated it? It seems to me like they avoided it in the hopes that I wouldn't notice, because, presumably if I had, I would have IMMEDIATELY disabled it.

Also why doesn't their task manager show that it's actually the one downloading? Why does it go out of it's way to hide this activity?

Since I have conky on my desktop I could catch this immediately, and take the action I preferred with my own computer, which was to _immediately_ disable it.

You don't understand the difference between "I run a local LLM because I chose to" vs "The browser chose to run a local LLM and I have no say"? You don't understand?

Not to mention that the LLM that I choose to run requires a monster machine and is infinitely more capable than whatever google chose to put on their browser?

I mean, none of this affects me because I don't use chrome, obviously, but you don't see the difference? Bewildering.