Comment by TheServitor
1 day ago
Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.
1 day ago
Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.
Your word might be of petabytes of traffic. Some people have slow lines. Some people have metered Internet subscriptions.
Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.
Or just tethering abroad with an esim data plan... Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded. Google you are sick!
Surely it will wait when the connection is marked as metered.
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Yeah I have to run ski race software with slow and intermittent internet. It is things like this that can wreck the race and bankrupt the small club if we have to refund entry fees to an entire field. It really is brutal and real. Looking at you windows update and now Google and Chrome.
yeah 3 bucks a gig here for quite a while, finally got a kinda sorta unlimited connection recently. I scripted up a meter of sorts to watch my traffic and its amazing how much is just trash. video advertising of any sort is awful. there were many sites that if I just forgot about them in the browser window they would happily reload periodically and trash my days budget lol, then using "links" for just reading really shows off how many websites just reject you for not having javascript.
now I'm working on upgrading my computer lol
It's somewhat known that Chrome isn't catering to those users. They aim to deliver feature-rich experiences rather than be the de-facto browser for resource-constrained devices.
I'm not sure if this is satire, but chrome literally powers the web. It IS the web browser market. Chrome caters to everyone.
Okay, but that's still not an environmental disaster.
I do not agree: I live by the sea and this is exactly the answer I get when I talk about trash in the sea. I personally appreciate even more that kind of "stretch" then the privacy one (which could be another "stretch" on getting closer to 1984 scenario)
I guess you can write an article about every new gigabyte released, and we can use more gigabytes talking about it, but other than that I don't see that any one gigabyte of software I don't want is especially more noteworthy than any other gigabyte of software I don't want.
An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses!
I'm not at all saying nothing matters so we shouldn't care. I just disagree about the utility of calling out specific things out of proportion to their place in the climate crisis. Tackle AI, yes, and fast fashion and cars, and ... that one change to Chrome? I guess if that's where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.
I feel like you're being intentionally naive here. There's a difference between a forum using up a gig here or there, and one of the biggest software makers in the world shipping 4GB to all of its millions of users (if not billions at this point).
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> An xBox game can be 50+ gigs.
In my experience a game worth playing never exceeded 1 (one) gig in size.
It is only incompetent creators that feel the need to bury their incompetence under gigabytes of irrelevance.
1 reply →
Chrome is used by about 3.8 billion people [1]. So, if this is rolled out to every chrome user over the next year or two, this would generate about 15 Exabytes of traffic. It's difficult to find accurate, useful numbers on this, but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB, this would be about 450k tons of CO2e. This in turn, equates to average household CO2 expenditure of almost 300k households.
So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me.
[1]: https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/ [2]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... [3]: https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-ton...
This is about the same as each of those people streaming a movie to their TV. There's no there there.
They do that anyway, so it's in addition to that which is the parent's point.
But that is a choice of an individual. Not a central place rolling it out.
> but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB
29 grams for something that takes most folks less than 20 seconds to download? How many watts (neglecting the machinery was going to be running regardless of whether you are transferring something!) do you think it takes to transfer data?
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Coal, the absolute worst of all, represents 18 grams over 60 full seconds to produce 1000 watts of power.
Most folks have >400Mbps connections now (ignoring frame overhead, unsaturated pipes, TCP window size scaling time, etc.)? That’s amazing news.
Traffic is not homogeneous in total transfer cost. CDN-hosted data at the edge, close to the user is much cheaper than data that has to transit many hops. At the asymptote, transferring data between machines on the LAN is essentially free.
Yes and this is just the first version of this model. As if there won't be an update (complete replacement) of the model every few months.
Other comparisons:
About equal to a major iOS update at 8 GB x 1.5B.
Netflix and YouTube together are perhaps around 200EB/month.
What is a lot of traffic to you?
2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic.
I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.
More data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits more in a morning than that
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!
2 replies →
Valve published some numbers of this.
11.42 petabytes per hour, and roughly 190,000 GB per minute and 100 exabytes delivered in 2025.
You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
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.
Wikipedia say 3.6 billion Chrome users.
Amazing how many people missed the "environmental disaster" part of this post and are talking about personal inconvenience.
Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.
And adding climate hysteria here diminishes the climate change argument generally. It's like "the boy who cried wolf".
Whilst I am sceptical about Google in this space I do think it is a move in the right direction to do more locally and actually use the space modern machines have on device.
The same old individualistic fallacy [1] of highlighting individual effects to hide global effects, all while compromising user privacy. In reality this will be continuous million of devices downloading these useless weight files.
[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
60.000.000 kg ÷ 1.000.000.000 user
is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?
Which ullustrates that humanity has reached such numbers that the smallest collective change has an enormous impact.
How do you propose maintaining the living conditions you've become accustomed to without the system we have currently, as shit as it is?
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There are multiple problems here.
For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.
The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.
Another angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable and from google's side worth doing whether the users is paying for the service or not, and each of them will have more power usage with some reduced battery life on portable devices. At that scale I'd also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU/GPU/NPU.
framing 4 gb of data per user as 4 gb is even more of a stretch
The next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)
Netflix does not store 4gb on your drive...
and people on very limited bandwidth and/or speed don't watch Netflix (or do so at most at 1080p) and if they watch netflix they are fine with clogging up their internet as it isn't some random backround download hindering what they want to do but what they are actively doing
It does if it triggers this download.
I would more worry about storage space on some laptops with pretty small SSDs like 192-256GB of official capacity prior installing Windows, 4GB of that is already pretty significant part of storage space for something which should be opt-in.
4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?
The climate concern pearl clutching is pure muckraking. The author doesn't care, they're just looking for some sort of controversy. Do they (or the other seemingly horrified commenters) know how much data is transferred during a single evening of watching HD streaming video?
In 2026 4GB of data is not going to have any measurable effect on the climate.
There's a level of hypocrisy involved which is truly absurd. Literally no one reading this is going to curb their data usage. They'll just try to justify their outrage with farcical strawman arguments to be pedantic and then go binge watch some Netflix series without another thought.
What is petabytes if not 4GB at Chrome userbase scale?
Its unsollicited. Not everyone has fiber either
not just fiber, e.g. Netflix requires "only" (reliable) ~15Mb/s for a 4k stream, that means most people in most countries feel little difference between ~25 Mb/s and 1Gb/s in their "every day" usage. Sure it's a huge difference if you download a 80GiB AAA game, or preload a 4k movie. But in my experience (which definitely doesn't apply to all countries) a lot of non tech affine people don't do that that often an if they do it (e.g. movies before travel) they tend to do it over the night so it still works out just fine with not so fast internet.
So for a lot of people paying for more then 25-50Mb/s (pro person) makes only sense if it isn't too costly. Hence I rarely see people going for more then 250-500 Mb/s even iff 1Gb/s is available and they have money. And for non-gamers with little money, I mostly see them with ~50Mb/s (or paying for 50Mb/s but getting much less due to old wires :( ).
(Also IMHO The more important things compared to 1Gb/s is how much of the bought bandwidth is reliably available at all times _with good latency_...)
Agreed, my eyes rolled hard at that. Definitely more of an F-U to users with bad connections than anything else.
I mean, with the price of SSDs lately, 4GB is not a completely negligible addition.
It is sad that this terrible comment inspired so many responses. It is 4GB of traffic for one person, and I am not aware of any single person who is moving petabytes of traffic.
Comparing a single person to the entire world to make the inconvenience to or violation of a single person seem small is deliberately and thoughtfully deceptive.
Why not 4TB in traffic and storage for chrome, then? In a world of petabytes of traffic, it's a feather. What's wrong with jailing somebody wrongly for 20 years in a world where millions are jailed, many wrongly, often for lifetimes? What's a lost finger on the job when there's a genocide going on?