Chrome AI takes up 4GB of your computer storage and there may be nothing you can do about it

AI features have made their way into nearly everything, whether you want them or not. And they tend to take up tons of space. Now we know that Chrome comes with 4GB of AI onboard that it deposits into your storage

In a post on That Privacy Guy, Alexander Hanff writes that Chrome comes with a 4GB weights.bin file for Gemini Nano that it writes to disk. There is no warning about the massive size or option to deselect AI features during the download of Chrome.

According to Hanff, the file powers the "Help me write" feature, on-device scam detection, and other AI-assisted browser functions.

Don’t be fooled about privacy

Hanff cautions that this seemingly local version of AI does not come with the privacy that would be implied.

“Every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing by Google's hosted models,” he writes.

In other words, users are not getting any benefit in exchange for those precious 4GB.

Deleting doesn’t always work

If you’re low on space on your computer and are ready to remove the file, there’s some bad news. While you can find the file by opening the OptGuideOnDeviceModel directory in Chrome data folders, it’s very likely that after you delete it, Chrome will reinstall it.

If you successfully delete it, you can try to prevent a reload by going to Settings>System and toggling off the On-Device AI option, but that doesn’t work for everyone. I was able to do it on a MacBook running Chrome version 148. But I was not able to do it on a Pixelbook Go running Chrome version 147.

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If you’re looking for the bright side, you will not lose your last bit of space to Gemini Nano. On a Google page for developers, Google says, “The Gemini Nano model is automatically deleted if the device’s free disk space drops below a certain threshold.”

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Posts By  Karandeep Singh Oberoi