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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent.
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this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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You already shouldn't be using Chrome, and if this is what moves the needle, great.
No.
Just flatly, no.
Local models spin your GPU like a video game. Unless you think Overwatch is a climate disaster, please learn to separate datacenter condemnation from people running their own computers a little harder.
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!✨
I hate the idea of AI agents on my phone without my consent. So this is definitely fucked up. And fuck google in general.
But the power consumption argument makes little sense. That's like downloading one movie in 1080p.
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.
The root comment opens with 'don't use Chrome.' This tangent is about specific overblown fixation on power use... for downloads.
I am telling you to apply your own criticism of bandwidth to anything else Google does. Four gigs to every desktop Chrome user is still a drop in the bucket compared to a streaming service. If the average Chrome user has watched two movies online, they've done just as much environmental damage. Which is to say: not much.
Agreed. Hate the data centers and corporate obsession with extreme waste for total value capture. Not the tech, especially on a local scale.
A 128GB amd strix halo runs at 120W and can host large LLMs at home. If you ran it full time for inference it would still be under $20/mo in electricity costs.
90% of users aren't playing Overwatch.
And even if you are, that's a significant increase in power draw if you're spinning up a local LLM every time you start to type into your browser's address bar to do a search or something.
And, most importantly, you can choose when and if you want to play Overwatch. It didn't get installed without your knowledge and consent, and it doesn't run automatically.
Please tell me you aren't using a carbon footprint argument, you know. The ones Oil companies use to blame us, a population of people for climate change, instead of take action against them, and their corporate buddies. Who are a single large contributor, if not the entire problem in and of itself.
Even though we're probably very different in our beliefs I would agree that I don't want things using GPU without my consent. But I don't agree in justifying it or hatred of AI with carbon footprint rhetoric created by the companies who created this problem in the first place.
If everyone chose to play Overwatch, would that be a climate catastrophe, specifically?
I'm not sure if that would rise the level of 'catastrophe' but it would certainly draw a lot of power, which would be bad for the climate, since much of that power would come from burning fossil fuels.
Does the general existence of the video game industry deserve the same finger-wagging about environmental impact? Guy in the other subthread did the math for everyone downloading this one file, and refuses to extend that concern to all the people streaming movies.
I don't feel like using your video card is the worst thing most randos have done re: climate change. There's some uncomfortable accounting every time you eat a hamburger.
The power involved here is just not a big deal. Not unless we want to harangue people for a variety of other unremarkable habits.