Chrome and Edge take up 20GB of hard drive! Quietly download AI models in the background

Kuai Technology reported on August 9 that Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers have increased the disk space requirements for local AI models to 20GB. The browser will silently download these models in the background for device-side AI functions. In May this year, Chrome was exposed to automatically download about 4GB of AI models for running AI functions locally instead of uploading them all to Google servers. Now Google has quietly updated the official help document to increase the free disk space requirement from 4GB to about 20GB. This 20GB is not the size of the model itself, but a prerequisite for downloading. The actual model occupation may be lower than this number. The requirements for Edge are basically the same, also requiring 20GB of available space, but with an additional GPU memory threshold: at least 5.5GB of memory. Microsoft also said that if the available storage drops below 10GB, the model will be automatically deleted to ensure the normal operation of other browser functions. For users with ample storage, the 20GB occupation will not have much impact, but on devices with limited hard drive capacity, it is indeed worthy of attention that the browser quietly eats up a large chunk of storage space. Fortunately, both provide shutdown options. Chrome can turn off the device-side AI function on the system page in settings, and Edge will automatically clean up the model when storage is insufficient.