I never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.

> You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.

i certainly never activated it willfully. i use Chrome only as a fallback testing platform for web dev - a handful of times per month - yet both Chrome Stable and Chrome Unstable had installed this 4GB monstrosity in my home dir. 8GB of junk i'd never used. Both have since been uninstalled and replaced with Chromium.

Do you think this will not be part of some google product? On top of their normal agenda, this seems perfectly suited for them to push their AI models. So if you use anything from Google via Chrome, I would expect that this will end up on your device sooner or later.

You estimate more or less than 2.5 million?

If you google OptGuideOnDeviceModel, there’s already a lot of results of people asking what it is an how they can delete them. It’s not some kind of obscure niche feature.

I wonder when the first crypto miner-like malware appears that offloads model usage to the client computers.

I suspect it's not that simple. Last week I noticed I already had it downloaded on one of my devices, even though I'm sure the number of websites already using this API is miniscule.

There are far more Google Chrome users than probably PlayStation & Steam users combined.

Also, someone installing Steam is going to expect large downloads, hell, the platform tells you the size as you're about to start the download.

I don't think anyone expects a browser to suddenly download 4GB, let alone behind their backs!

Valve published some numbers of this.

11.42 petabytes per hour, and roughly 190,000 GB per minute and 100 exabytes delivered in 2025.