The AI tax is crazy, Pixels now reserve 3.5GB of RAM to keep Googles local models permanently loaded regardless of how much you use them, or whether you use them at all. The base Pixel 10 has 12GB of RAM so that's nearly a third set aside for something you may never use!
Last year they had the relative sense to only enable that "feature" on the higher end SKUs with 16GB of RAM, while the lower end SKUs with 12GB would load the models on-demand, but starting with the Pixel 10 series it now applies across the board.
That is wild. And so disrespectful of apps that may need that extra memory. I wonder if GrapheneOS will also suffer this memory overhead, once they do support this newest Android. Or possibly allow disabling it.
This only happens if the AICore app is installed. Since it isn't on Graphene then the full 16gb allocation of ram is available for the entire system.
I've read people say that there is a setting to disable it.
Thanks for the reminder. I just disabled AICore and freed 2GB in my Pixel 9 Pro.