Can't load pre-trained Google News model on Windows

[dataspelunking]

On Microsoft Windows, attempting to use the pre-trained Google News model (downloaded from https://code.google.com/archive/p/word2vec/) seems to result in the following error:

Error: fileMapper: file GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin is empty, nothing to read

The same code works fine on the MacOS:

library(word2vec)
m_w2v <- read.word2vec(file = "GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin", normalize = TRUE)

When searching for a solution, a similar issue was found on Stack Overflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76530225/how-can-i-load-the-pretrained-googlenews-model-using-word2vec-in-r

Any ideas on a fix or a workaround would be appreciated!