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by carpenecopinum 1384 days ago
In principle, yes. With webGPU (but also WebGL2) we get access to compute shaders, which makes it feasible/easier to evaluate a model like Stable Diffusion.

The biggest issue I see is that those models (or rather their trained parameters) are usually pretty large (several GiB). So it'll take a while to set up in the browser before the evaluation can actually start. It'll also require a lot of bandwidth on both ends.

A lot of those things should already be doable with the fragment shaders we get from WebGL and a lot of hackery, like clever (ab)use of textures. So the actual issue that we're not seeing a lot of this is probably not due to it being impossible right now...
2 comments
capableweb 1384 days ago
> The biggest issue I see is that those models (or rather their trained parameters) are usually pretty large (several GiB). So it'll take a while to set up in the browser before the evaluation can actually start. It'll also require a lot of bandwidth on both ends.

Might not be feasible due to memory constraints (I'm not sure), but browsers can load data from disk into memory without having to touch the network. So you could in theory ask the users to download the model separately, then ask them to select it from a file picker, and the browser can have access to it that way.

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lmeyerov 1384 days ago
Next step: browser JS VMs need to allow you access gigs of RAM in-memory, it's surprisingly locked down
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flyteuk 1384 days ago
It'd be nice if the models could be loaded via WebTorrent[1], which would significantly reduce the bandwidth requirement for whomever releases it.

[1] https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

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tough 1384 days ago
The models are certainly available on torrent though
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jakogut 1384 days ago
Right. Another option is running the model locally from a web page, served from the project source directory, which is still a lot easier than setting up a platform specific GPU accelerated ML dev environment.
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krona 1383 days ago
WebGL2 doesn't support compute shaders.
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pjmlp 1383 days ago
It did for a short while as an extension, then Google decided to throw away Intel's work and only support compute in WebGPU.
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