Chrome silently downloads a 4GB AI mannequin. Here is find out how to take away it

Google’s Chrome browser is already a infamous storage hog, however now comes phrase that it’s crowding our PC drives in a brand new means: with an area AI mannequin. That mannequin, noticed by That Privacy Guy, will get silently downloaded to your PC or Mac upon putting in Chrome, and it gobbles up a whopping 4GB of space for storing.

Spoiler alert: Yes, you’ll be able to take away the file, and I’m going to indicate you ways. But first, some particulars on what’s occurring.

The particular file is known as weights.bin. On my Mac, I discovered it in Chrome’s Applications Support folder in Finder:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/OptGuideOnGadget Model/

Windows customers will discover the file within the AppData listing:

C:UsersAppDataNativeGoogleChromeConsumer DataOptGuideOnGadgetModel

To get to the AppData listing, press Windows Key + R, sort %LOCALAPPDATA%GoogleChromeConsumer Data instantly into the dialog field, then press Enter.

On my Mac, the weights.bin file was taking on 4.27 GB of storage. If you delete the file, Chrome will merely reinstall it the subsequent probability it will get.

So, what precisely is weights.bin and what does it do?

As That Privacy Guy notes, that file consists of the “weights” for Gemini Nano, the native AI mannequin that lives in Google’s Chrome browser. Unlike Gemini within the cloud, Nano sits instantly in your PC and performs quite a lot of AI duties instantly in your system.

Among the native AI duties that Gemini Nano could deal with embody summarizing net pages you go to, organizing your Chrome tabs, warning you about on-line scams, and providing writing assist or rephrasing textual content as you sort, in keeping with a Google assist web page.

Having an area AI mannequin in your machine presents an a variety of benefits relying on the duty, together with decrease latency and doubtlessly better privateness (though Chrome should be sharing at the very least a few of your browser exercise with Google HQ).

But native fashions additionally take up a number of space for storing. Gemini Nano’s 4GB footprint really isn’t dangerous so far as smaller native fashions go—the 31 billion-parameter model of Google’s Gemma 4 takes up 20 GB of storage, for instance, whereas the 128 billion-parameter Mistral Medium hogs an enormous 80 GB of house.

Again, merely deleting the weights.bin file gained’t work, as Chrome will robotically reinstall the lacking file. But you can take away the 4GB obtain one other means: by altering a single Chrome setting. Just go to Settings > System, then toggle the “On-device AI” setting to Off. When I did that on my Mac, the weights.bin file disappeared instantly. 

Of course, turning Chrome’s native AI setting off nixed Chrome’s native AI performance, together with textual content solutions and rip-off warnings. 

As far as Chrome quietly putting in the native AI mannequin in your system within the first place, it’s a matter of scorching debate. For his half, The Privacy Guy calls out Google for depositing the file on customers’ PCs with no consent dialog—and he has a degree. 

Moving forward, although, we’re going to see increasingly desktop apps downloading native AI fashions onto our programs, for higher or worse.