Chrome Silently Installs a 4 GB Local LLM on Your Computer

More from the article ...

... 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.

This the what Google calls the "Nano" version of its Gemini local LLM, which powers its Prompt API. That page links to general info about Google's Gemini LLM, but the site about its use on Android has some specific info about Gemini Nano. ...

Meanwhile ...

Need a new hard drive? Well, the price has gone up ...

The 2026 storage crisis: Why AI data centers are hoarding every hard drive on the market
www.howtogeek.com

... HDDs were, until not too long ago, seen as the premier option for escaping price hikes as SSDs began being affected by the ongoing global RAM shortage.

The problem is that these price hikes are starting to catch up to hard drives as well. ...

The problem now, however, is that hard drives are currently experiencing their own massive supply crisis. The exact same artificial intelligence boom that caused the memory shortage is simultaneously driving an unprecedented surge in demand for high-capacity hard drives within hyperscale data centers. While artificial intelligence operations require blazing-fast memory for active processing, the underlying foundation of these large language models relies on storing tens of thousands of petabytes of training data, images, and video.

SSDs are far too expensive for this bulk archiving, meaning the world's largest cloud service providers and artificial intelligence laboratories are aggressively buying up every available hard drive on the market. The situation has reached such an extreme that major storage manufacturers like Western Digital have publicly confirmed their entire hard drive production capacity is completely sold out for the entirety of calendar 2026. Data center giants have even locked in firm purchase orders for hard drives extending well into 2027 and 2028, effectively draining the supply pool for everyone else. ...

@#4 ... "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" ...

I do not disagree.

Instead I strongly agree.

And that explains the [usual by that bellringer alter-alias] lame #5 response.

I'd proffer that most of the folk using computers of late haven't a clue about rootkits.

They rely upon the protection the operating system offers to keep them safe.

So, how good is the major OS, Windows, in that task?

@#9 ... A Galaxy and my first Android phone. ...

imo, and in my experience...

That may be more a fault of Galaxy than Android.

I don't see similar behavior on the Android phones from other manufacturers I buy.

Indeed, that is one of the main reasons why I do not purchase Samsung phones.

YMMV, and all that ...