Recently, Google Chrome, the browser with the highest market share globally, was exposed for silently pushing and downloading the 4GB Gemini Nano model to devices that meet certain criteria without users' knowledge. More troubling for many users is that even after manually deleting the related files, the browser secretly re-downloads them in the background. This "forced installation" has sparked widespread attention within the tech community.
According to reports, Gemini Nano is a lightweight large model designed by Google specifically for local devices, mainly supporting its controversial Prompt API feature. However, this so-called "lightweight" model has clear hardware requirements. Devices need at least 16GB of memory and 4GB of VRAM, as well as at least 22GB of available space on the partition where the browser is installed.
Chrome currently has about 3.8 billion users, among which the number of devices meeting the above hardware requirements is extremely large. Industry insiders point out that even without considering the traffic loss caused by repeated downloads, silently pushing 4GB of data to hundreds of millions of devices is an astonishing waste of network resources and storage space.
A striking comparison is that the Chrome browser's installation package is only about 1GB. The AI model that quietly infiltrates is four times the size of the software itself, which clearly exceeds the psychological expectations of most users regarding "feature updates" or "plugin enhancements."
