Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
I’d say you should read the article a little more closely, but it’s not written very well. But it brings up interesting things that have nothing to do with your local GPU usage. For example, it names an interesting point about simply delivering 4 gigabytes of data to that many people. If pushed out to ~15% of Chrome users without consent:
That’d be 500 million people
It would be 2 exabytes of data
120 GWh of energy, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 36,000 average UK households
30,000 tonnes CO2 emitted, roughly the annual emissions of 6,500 cars
And that’s just for the initial data push. Models need ✨updates!✨
The point is that servers don’t belch black smoke when they send you one file. This model is the size of a four-hour Youtube video. How many people watch how many hours of video, every single day? We only see this hand-wringing minutia over internet use when talking about neural networks, and it’s getting weird.
Much weirder when people try to shift blame off corporations pushing stuff on people without their consent, and on people minding their own business.
Weren’t you just telling me that data centers would use energy regardless anyway? I can’t keep track of these talking points, except it seems like they’re all pro AI.
I’d say you should read the article a little more closely, but it’s not written very well. But it brings up interesting things that have nothing to do with your local GPU usage. For example, it names an interesting point about simply delivering 4 gigabytes of data to that many people. If pushed out to ~15% of Chrome users without consent:
And that’s just for the initial data push. Models need ✨updates!✨
We must kill the environmental disaster that is Steam.
Youtube is history’s greatest monster.
Installing a game you want is different than hundreds of millions of people having something they didn’t ask for getting pushed on them.
Not in terms of power use.
Power use is not always bad. Power waste is. 4GB I’m not going to use is much worse than 6GB I will use.
The atmosphere doesn’t care whether you found joy in how you’ve impacted it. Either downloading files is bad, actually, or it’s not a big deal.
What happened to separating personal use from condemning data centers for expending unnecessary and unwanted energy?
Does consent change how much power a server uses?
Here, yes. Two exabytes of data transfer could have been one or zero.
I don’t get the point you’re trying to make here.
The point is that servers don’t belch black smoke when they send you one file. This model is the size of a four-hour Youtube video. How many people watch how many hours of video, every single day? We only see this hand-wringing minutia over internet use when talking about neural networks, and it’s getting weird.
Much weirder when people try to shift blame off corporations pushing stuff on people without their consent, and on people minding their own business.
Weren’t you just telling me that data centers would use energy regardless anyway? I can’t keep track of these talking points, except it seems like they’re all pro AI.