With every passing year, local AI models get smaller, more efficient, and more comparable in power with their higher-end, cloud-hosted counterparts. You can run many of the same inference jobs on your own hardware, without needing an internet connection or even a particularly powerful GPU.
The hard part has been standing up the infrastructure to do it. Applications like ComfyUI and LM Studio offer ways to run models locally, but they’re big third-party apps that still require their own setup and maintenance. Wouldn’t it be great to run local AI models right in the browser?
Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge now offer that as a feature, by way of an experimental API set. With Chrome and Edge, you can perform a slew of AI-powered tasks, like summarizing a document, translating text between languages, or generating text from a prompt. All of these are accomplished with models downloaded and run locally on demand.
In this article I’ll show a simple example of Chrome and Edge’s experimental l
OpenAI has shipped a Chrome extension for Codex, its AI coding agent, enabling it to complete browser-based tasks directly inside Google Chrome on macOS and Windows — including interacting with signed-in websites, using Chrome DevTools, and running multi-step workflows across browser tabs.
The post OpenAI Adds Chrome Extension to Codex, Letting Its AI Agent Access LinkedIn, Salesforce, Gmail, and Internal Tools via Signed-In Sessions appeared first on MarkTechPost.
Google Chrome can automatically download a local AI model that takes up to 4 gigabytes of hard drive space on a computer when certain AI features are enabled, according to The Verge.
The file, called weights.bin, is used by Google’s Gemini Nano AI model to provide writing assistance, autocomplete, and fraud protection directly on the device. (Nano has been around since Gemini was introduced in late 2023.)
Since the model runs locally, the AI data is stored on the computer instead of in the cloud, which can provide better privacy, but also takes up storage space. Users can check whether the file is present by looking for the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder in Chrome’s system files.
To free up the space, users need to disable the on-device feature in Chrome’s settings under Settings > System.
Google Chrome may be taking up more of your storage than expected thanks to a large on-device AI model file that, in some cases, is being automatically downloaded to the browser's system folders. Users who have noticed unexplained drops in their available desktop device storage are now discovering that Chrome is installing a 4GB weights.bin file inside their browser directory when certain AI features are enabled.
The weights.bin file in question is connected to Google's Gemini Nano AI model, which powers Chrome AI tools like scam detection, writing assistance, autofill, and suggestion features. As the Gemini Nano model is designed to run lo …
Read the full story at The Verge.
A Norwegian researcher has identified an issue with Microsoft Edge’s Password Manager that could be a serious concern for businesses.
Tom Jøran Sønstebyseter Rønning found that passwords are being saved within the browser in plain text, with the effect that any PC, particularly a shared machine, within an organization is a potential risk.
In a post on X, Rønning explained that when users save passwords in Edge, the browser decrypts every credential at startup and keeps it resident in process memory, regardless of whether the user visits the site.
Rønning’s finding was replicated by German IT publication Heise.de, which created and saved a password and found that, even after the browser had been closed and re-opened, the password could be found in plain text.
Microsoft has been nonchalant about the discovery. Norwegian website Itavisen.no said, “Rønning reported the discovery to Microsoft, and according to the company, the behavior is ‘by design’.”
Itavisen.no further said that Rønning
ComfyUI, the node-based AI creative workflow platform, has closed a $30 million funding round at a $500 million valuation, led by Craft Ventures with participation from Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow. Founded in 2023 as an open-source response to the limitations of early diffusion models, ComfyUI gives creative professionals precise, step-by-step control over AI-generated image, […]
Windows admins are going to be busy this month, dealing with the largest Patch Tuesday cycle we can recall. The April release involves 165 updates and roughly 340 unique CVEs from Microsoft — including two zero-days, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild.
The Readiness team is recommending “Patch Now” schedules for nearly every major product family this month: Windows, Office (with a zero-day), Microsoft Edge (Chromium), SQL Server, and Microsoft Developer Tools (.NET). April also brings Phase 2 of Microsoft’s Kerberos RC4 hardening with full enforcement set for July. There is a lot to cover, so the Readiness team built an infographic mapping the deployment risk for each platform.
(More information about recent Patch Tuesday releases is available here.)
Known issues
Microsoft reports a single Windows 11 25H2 issue. It affects a narrow enterprise deployment group, but matters to anyone affected.
KB5083769 – BitLocker recovery prompt on first restart (Windows 11 2
