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.
Like the other guy said, it is magically more efficient because it’s magically significantly smaller. This model is likely a few billion parameters and frontier models are in the 1+ trillion parameter range.
Yeah, people’s mobile phones that run this model might die slightly faster, but playing a mobile game or doing any type of hardware intense process will kill your battery faster. It’s no different.