AI + ML You did remember to opt out of AI, didn't you? Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out. It's called weights.bin and it's stored in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down the file and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstate it. The discovery was announced this week by Alexander Hanff, who blogs as "the Privacy Guy," in a somewhat sensationally titled blog post: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane . It doesn't seem to be new, though: there are signs that Chrome has been doing this for quite some time. In April 2025, this Reddit post suggests the model was "just" 3 GB, but a Stack Overflow question says that by November 2025 it was already up to 4 GB. We would not be at all surprised if soon it went to five .…