Chrome Includes Secret AI Model for Websites to Use

And is this the end of alt text for images? Why why would you say that? Chrome have actually released a language model built into Chrome and it's called Gemini Nano. It does image understanding, does speech transcription, it's got text summarization, the usual stuff you'd uh come to expect from using a a model. Akut actually said about this on one of our previous episodes that they're they're building it directly into Chrome, but I think this is a statement of that it's actually usable. I tried the documentation is pretty rubbish, but I'm guessing you have to be in some you have to be in some sort of group or something or other, but um yeah, uses 4 gig of RAM as well, which is really cool. Very small obviously we talk about 16 gig and all the rest of it. Yeah, Chrome just taking 4 GB more. It's nothing but they are already taking. It's just a tiny bit more. Yeah. The only thing is I'm uncertain about and they've actually flagged it here is it takes 22 gig of free space and I don't know whether that's the model but 22 gig of and then they have this little built-in model should be significantly smaller. So, I'm not quite sure what this is. I tried playing with it. I tried using it, downloading it or doing something. I I I was, you know, wrestling around with it, but I couldn't couldn't figure it out. You should be able to just run this and it will download the model and then you set up Oh, not that one. Sorry. So, wait a second. So, this is a model that you download on your machine and it is a part of it just runs inside of Chrome. So this is an API that your website could use. Yeah, this is like super cool. Uh and is this the end of alt text for images? Why why would you say that? If your browser already can analyze images, why do you need to write alt text? Like the alt text can be generated if it's empty by the model that is running in your chrome. So I would say no because two for two reasons. one for permissions in it's not just gonna like run AI on your machine annoyingly. I think we're far far away from AI running like behind the 247. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because people are too sensitive even though it's already been happening on pretty much everyone's Apple device. The other aspect is is that the website itself might not have like implemented the call to that because it's an external API. It needs to be the website that takes charge of doing that. So I think that the probably who people who need that feature probably have some sort of plug-in, don't they? I don't know. So here's a question like what are the benefits of having such a small model? It is I understand it's quite good for the size but it's not comparable to you know bigger models and if you are inside of Google Chrome you are connected to the internet so why not you know call an external API and just use a much bigger more performant model than a smaller one that you know takes uh the speed of your machine Um I think privacy again it's privacy it's uh it's speed is going to be a lot faster because it's a smaller model and it uses less like resource. I mean they must have they must have done comparisons and the trade-off of having a local model you know with not not the world's knowledge necessarily but what is deemed pretty uh universally you know so maybe yeah maybe yeah maybe because like a lot of these cool projects are just cool projects people do it without like comparing it or have a real world you know example or use case they just do it because they are passionate about and and we see if how well they get implemented. Google has done hundreds of thousands of these projects. But it's it's really cool. I am actually looking forward to it. But I just don't know like what is the actual use case over another model that but you mentioned privacy. So sure. Yeah. Yeah. And like I say, it's an API that websites can use, you know, just like you can use, you know, scroll add event listener and blah blah blah. So, uh, we we have, you know, because obviously you got all these Chromium forks, DIA, Comet, pretty much all of the AI browsers are Chromium based and they're built on top of it. This could potentially provide a foundation for all of those brand all of those forks to to leverage off. So, it's pretty Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the community does with it, how clever ways they can utilize it. So, I'm I'm down for it. Exactly. So for the next one uh we should stick to the topic Google Chrome uh and perplexity trying to buy it. This is part of a larger conversation on my show Command AI which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.