Comment by imglorp
1 day ago
Sure, local models good and yes, there's no way we can trust Google.
We can be positive the entire motivation of Chrome is user behavior surveillance. There's not a nano-chance in all the multiverses that Chrome model is doing anything privately. They've gone to extraordinary length to accomplish this. It's not for free.
It is entirely about user surveillance as well as pushing their product on to their users because they have the install base. Google Chrome has become Microsoft IE6 in hostile user behavior.
If Google were focused on surveillance, why haven't they been collecting keystroke data (like grammarly) for years?
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.
What did we expect when they dropped "don't be evil" from their company values?
A claim about as useful then as it is now. They never wanted to be anything but, once Sergei left. The Schmidt era had them publicly declare one thing while doing something else entirely behind the curtain.
They were corporate evil from day 1. The rest was just PR slogans, and playing the good guy as long as you don't need to squeeze profits.
Isn’t it really “pushing a feature to their products”?
Not when you are appropriating 2GB or more of space for that feature.
I don't trust them either, but the same Google makes Gemma 4 available to run as locally and privately as you want, and those models are pretty amazing for their size.
Both can be true: they give a nice local model so you find it useful AND the chrome harness captures every token in and out for exfiltration.
LLMs are costing Google a ton of money in compute and storage right now. If they can farm any of that off to the users, it makes economical sense.
But yes, there is a 100% chance that logs will get sent back to Google too.
> farm
Ooh, this is interesting. There's nothing stopping them from sending jobs down to local machines. That's some 3 billion nodes. We went through this with coin mining and spam botting.
Nothing stopping it except your ire if it's discovered.