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Comment by ScoobleDoodle | Hacker News Reader

For someone with more knowledge than me: How does this affect other Chromium based browsers?

I did some web searches and see Brave has its own AI thing “Leo” that is intended to preserve privacy. But I don’t think that is on device. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I use Firefox myself but have family and friends who use various Chromium based browsers.

Thank you.

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Brave's "Leo" AI is configurable enough to specify local endpoints for processing, instead of going wherever they want it to go. I've set it up to use my own systems, and it works just fine like that.

If you have a beefy enough device, then yes this can be done on-device.

Chromium mostly does not support this, because it doesn't have the binary blob required to run the inference. However, it does still download the model weights and expose the LanguageModel API, because that part is hooked up.

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

Packagers might eventually disable that but I tested this behaviour in chromium 148 a few hours ago, and it would download the weights but has trouble running them.

My guess is that this falls under a Google service and the models themselves wouldn't be added to open source Chromium. Even if it were, Chromium forks would likely exclude it like they did for FLoC because of its unpopularity.

Also, does this affect Chrome for iOS, Android, and iPadOS?

The docs say "not yet."[0] My guess is that for Android they probably plan to enable it for high end phones, and for iOS they'll probably just stick to non-API AI features.

[0]: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api#hardware-req...

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