TECH NEWS

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

https://image.theregister.com/1630793.jpg?imageId=1630793&x=0&y=0&cropw=100&croph=100&panox=0&panoy=0&panow=100&panoh=100&width=1200&height=683

AI + ML

You did remember to opt out of AI, didn't you?

Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.

It's calledweights.bin and it's stored in a folder calledOptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down thefile and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstateit.

The discovery was announced this week by Alexander Hanff, who blogsas "the Privacy Guy," in a somewhat sensationally titled blog post: GoogleChrome 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 hasbeen doing this for quite some time. In April 2025, this Redditpost suggests the model was "just" 3 GB, but a StackOverflow questionsays that by November 2025 it was already up to4...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE

Read more

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iQxnL5D7fN3Y/v0/1200x800.jpg

Alibaba's T-Head unveils the Zhenwu M890 AI chip for training and inference, saying it is particularly suited for agentic tasks, and plans annual upgrades

Sponsor Posts Niantic Spatial: World models need real-world data — Scaniverse is the gateway to spatial services — self-serve and built for AI and robotics. Large-area 3D reconstruction from 360° cameras and precise localization, anywhere machines operate. Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data
https://images.ft.com/v3/image/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fcms-image-bucket-productionv3-ap-northeast-1-a7d2.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com%2Fimages%2F7%2F9%2F2%2F6%2F12516297-1-eng-GB%2F7f4ecf3f98...

SkyeChip becomes the first Malaysian chip design company to IPO on the Bursa Malaysia exchange, surging 300%+; the company was valued at ~$397M at its IPO price

Sponsor Posts Niantic Spatial: World models need real-world data — Scaniverse is the gateway to spatial services — self-serve and built for AI and robotics. Large-area 3D reconstruction from 360° cameras and precise localization, anywhere machines operate. Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data