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L'Emmerdeur
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by L'Emmerdeur » Fri May 08, 2026 3:26 pm
Chrome browser wants you to have a 'little' LLM on your machine.
'Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer'
Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.
It's called weights.bin and it's stored in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down the file and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstate it.
The discovery was announced this week by Alexander Hanff, who blogs as "the Privacy Guy," in a somewhat sensationally titled blog post: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
It doesn't seem to be new, though: there are signs that Chrome has been doing this for quite some time. In April 2025, this Reddit post suggests the model was "just" 3 GB, but a Stack Overflow question says that by November 2025 it was already up to 4 GB. We would not be at all surprised if soon it went to five.
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If you didn't opt out, Google has some info on how to disable it. In brief: in Chrome's address box, enter the special URL chrome://flags. In the resulting page, look for an entry named optimization-guide-on-device-model and set it to Disabled, then restart Chrome. The browser should then delete the weights.bin file.
In theory, you can also use your OS to block this – or deploy enterprise policies, if you're free to set your own. (With any luck, soon this will be part of the Just The Browser policy that we reported on in January.)
The Reddit post we linked above says that Windows users can set a Registry key. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome, create a DWORD key called GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings and set it to 1, then restart Chrome.
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Brian Peacock
- Tipping cows since 1946
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by Brian Peacock » Fri May 08, 2026 3:34 pm
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one.
Rationalia relies on voluntary donations. There is no obligation of course, but if you value this place and want to see it continue please consider making a small donation towards the forum's running costs.
Details on how to do that can be found here.
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
Frank Zappa
"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Svartalf
- Offensive Grail Keeper
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by Svartalf » Fri May 08, 2026 10:24 pm
well, google not respecting your privacy and even effing stealing space from your disk unless you manage to opt out from something that i guess was deliberately hidden and made difficult to notice? anybody surprised? any question as to why I deleted chrome from my machine with extreme prejudice (and would do the same for edge except wincrap won't let me) and avoid browsers based on chromium as much as can be?
Embrace the Darkness, it needs a hug
PC stands for "Patronizing Cocksucker" Randy Ping
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Tero
- Just saying
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by Tero » Fri May 08, 2026 11:05 pm
You signed the waiver when you installed Chrome.
http://karireport.blogspot.com/
Inhibition, well, you can fly
Out the window to the clear blue sky
It will mess your suit, it will make you cry
It doesn't matter, give me Mumdane pie
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pErvinalia
- On the good stuff
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by pErvinalia » Sat May 09, 2026 12:04 am
Yep, I'm deleting chrome because of this. I don't really use it now that I don't still work at my old job where I needed multiple browsers.
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