How hard would have been to add a simple message, warning people about it and offering to opt out? Most would have clicked OK without reading anyway, and Google could pretend they give a shit about users. Unless they expected blowback, and that kind of message is the "compromise" they want to eventually land on.
They don't want you to opt out. Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered"
You're not even the customer when it comes to Google.
Don't forget the metric saying "99.97% of user have installed this" even though less than 1% of users know it exists, much less use it
Or "25% of users have used this in the last month" when it's made so easy to accidentally trigger it that the real usage is a few % at most.
it could easily be "after we replaced an existing UI element with a button to launch this instead, adoption increased 9001% month over month"
at this point you're barely the product either. You're more a passive platform for them to execute their strategy on.
Totally agreed. I was thinking about how to word it but I was giving up.
But I would consider us users to be more like an asset on their balance sheet. Not something they would care about the opinion of.
More like livestock tbh. Only instead of wool or meat or eggs being harvested, it’s mindshare and attention that they depend on
Makes me think of that scene of Neo waking up from the Matrix the first time and seeing the "battery pods"... yeah...
That's a good comparison to how I feel these days.
> Then they can't brag to the shareholders about Chrome being "AI Powered"
Or at least justify the hundreds of billions they are burning
I was not happy when they added Gemini to the top bar, in its own place that nothing else gets to use.
They want to force the prompt API into being a defacto standard without getting buy in by the rest of the web standards body. Having it on by default serves this goal.
I think a local AI model is appreciated, but it being bundled and executed through Chrome, I expect that more or less all data get exfiltrated by Google.
They simply read your mails, how would you expect there to be anything resembling decency in a company like that? It is the ad business.
Bad thing is that people still use gmail.
Doesn't google already extract every single letter you put into the address bar as you type?
The idea that the model is local is just Privacy Washing. What's the chance they aren't capturing your prompts somehow? For "Telemetry" so they can triage bugs of course!
Is it really privacy washing? This author assumed people would think AI was local but I don't know anyone like that. Everyone I know who's not deep in tech only uses big hosted models and isn't aware that anything else exists.
I'm more inclined to think it's cost unloading. Move their cloud GPU costs to your desktop.
Presumably they think the fraction of their userbase who cares about this would be too small to justify the expense of adding a warning message. The mere existence of a warning message implies that there is something to be worried or concerned, about, a position they probably do not endorse or accept.
Because we must get what the tech overlords want us to get, not what we want to get.