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Yes! In short: Do we leave it to every web app to figure out how best to serve everyone, and have them bundle their own tuning optimizers into each app? Or do
by rektide 4y ago
Yes! In short:
Do we leave it to every web app to figure out how best to serve everyone, and have them bundle their own tuning optimizers into each app? Or do we bake in a higher level abstraction that works for everyone that the browser itself will be able to help optimize?
There's some risk & the browser apis likely won't come with all the escape-hatches the full tools might have to manually jigger with optimizations, but the idea of getting everyone to DIY seems like a promise of misfit: way too much code when you don't need it, way not enough tuning when you do need it. And there's other risks; the assurity that oh we just need one or maybe two ops on the web & then everything will be fine forever doesn't wash with me. If we make new ops the old code won't use it.
And what about hardware that doesn't have any presence on the web; lots of cheap embedded cores have a couple tflops of neural coprocessing, but neither wasm nor webgpu can target that atm, it's much too simple a core for that kind of dynamic execution; it's the sea of weird expansive hardware that OpenXLA helps one target (and target very well indeed) that is it's chief capability, and I can't imagine forgoing a middleman abstraction like it.