Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
The article says it has hardware requirements to even download it. But yeah, you can run lots of stuff on the CPU, just at a fraction of the speed.
And for significantly more power draw right?
I’m assuming this is 3-4b model. That’s technically runnable on most consumer hw but I can hear the fans whirring now.
Hard to say. CPUs generally draw fewer watts, but they’ll also take longer to run the same job.