Last summer the Web Speech API got incorporated into browser standards, it's supposed to offer in-browser speech-to-text and the like, and full support of the API requires the browser vendor to offer the ability to download a language appropriate model for autonomous inference.

Going from this to deciding that it's now ok to side load unspecified 4GB models without telling the user is why we should never give these people an inch.

I'd say the numbers are more a bonus.

I assume they're putting it in under the guise of various browser "features" like automatic tab grouping or something, but also using it for Google products like Drive / Docs / Sheets to have offline agentic crap in there that would be more efficiently done without LLMs. I suspect this is as far up as they can hoist it because any further would be outside the bounds of the browser sandbox, which would prevent those products from easily calling it.

But the features themselves are probably not the end goal either. The more tempting motivation is that it allows for circumventing the data center problem by offloading the compute to the client. A couple of quick updates to the ToS and I can see it being used as a mesh llm network, sort of like the "find my device" network they rolled out last year.

The article mentions eprivacy and gdpr, but I don't think those are the most problematic here, assuming Google maintains mostly local-only compute. What I'd be interested to know is how this plays with DSA and DMA, which have more explicit requirements and more teeth.