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Ask HN: Does an in-browser neural network have any practical use?
I am thinking of starting a small site which will allow users to train and predict locally within a browser. No downloads and training data will stay local and private (never sent to the server). Everything should happen using the local resources.
This web application should allow training data of type JSON or CSV. Perhaps it can also allow streaming from the local file system. I think we can support all types of Feed Forward and Recurrent Neural Networks with this application.
Technically it’s all possible but are there any practical uses for such a thing to exist?
- moocowtruck 8y agofinding out where the user might click next and slapping an ad there
- sameercharles 8y agoWell.. that doesn't really add any value ;-)
- PaulHoule 8y agoIt would be educational. So far as getting inference done it would be hard to compete with the "big boys" who are trying to get special-purpose hardware into phones and such. Myself I am through with implementing neural network trainers by hand. If you have to compute all the derivatives by hand sooner or later you are going to drop a factor of 3 on the floor or you will become so afraid of doing that you'll never change anything that will force you to recalculate. (That's what I get for working on a "deep learning" project that was commercialized just before Tensorflow, PyTorch, etc. got big. C++, SIMD instructions, you name it...)
- sameercharles 8y agoThanks @PaulHoule, I agree. Not very keen on competing with the big boys, if something is useful people will use it.