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I led the design effort on this API, before retiring. Here's my writeup on some of the considerations that went into it: https://domenic.me/builtin-ai-api-desig

I led the design effort on this API, before retiring. Here's my writeup on some of the considerations that went into it: https://domenic.me/builtin-ai-api-design/ https://domenic.me/builtin-ai-api-design/

comboy 5mo ago
How do you envision short term and long term target usage of it? And do you guys communicate between other browsers when doing something like this to try to settle on something common? I don't mean W3C but practically, it's a small world after all.
- domenicd 5mo ago
  I can't speak for "you guys" anymore, as I'm retired, but from my personal perspective/recollection: The target usage for the prompt API is anything that would benefit from the general capabilities of a language model, and can't be encompassed by the more-specific APIs for summarization/writing/rewriting. Realistic use cases currently are things like sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, etc. I have a number of ideas on how to integrate it into my current retirement project around Japanese flashcards, e.g. generating example sentences. If the small (~10 GiB) model class keeps getting smarter, the class of things possible on-device in this way gets larger and larger over time. We definitely communicated with other browsers. There were the standing WebML Community Group meetings at the W3C every few weeks. There were async discussions like https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 and https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/495 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/495 . (Side note, I love the contrast between Mozilla's helpful in-depth feedback and WebKit's... less helpful feedback.) There was also a bit of a debacle where the W3C Technical Architecture Group tried to give "feedback" but the feedback ended up being AI-generated slop... https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1093 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1093 . But overall, yeah, the goal with the prompt API, as with all web APIs, is to put something out there for discussion as early as possible, and get input from the broad community, especially including other browsers, to see if it's something that they are interested in collaborating on. https://www.chromium.org/blink/guidelines/web-platform-changes-guidelines/ https://www.chromium.org/blink/guidelines/web-platform-chang... (which I also wrote) goes into how the Chromium project thinks about such collaboration in general.
  - zeratax 5mo ago
    > but the feedback ended up being AI-generated slop... Wow yeah the feedback is actually useless ai generated slop. Has that happened before?
    - domenicd 5mo ago
      Something similar happened with another API recently. https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1198#issuecomment-4167532657 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1198#issueco...
svieira 5mo ago
Congratulations on retiring!

comboy 5mo ago

How do you envision short term and long term target usage of it? And do you guys communicate between other browsers when doing something like this to try to settle on something common? I don't mean W3C but practically, it's a small world after all.

domenicd 5mo ago
I can't speak for "you guys" anymore, as I'm retired, but from my personal perspective/recollection: The target usage for the prompt API is anything that would benefit from the general capabilities of a language model, and can't be encompassed by the more-specific APIs for summarization/writing/rewriting. Realistic use cases currently are things like sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, etc. I have a number of ideas on how to integrate it into my current retirement project around Japanese flashcards, e.g. generating example sentences. If the small (~10 GiB) model class keeps getting smarter, the class of things possible on-device in this way gets larger and larger over time. We definitely communicated with other browsers. There were the standing WebML Community Group meetings at the W3C every few weeks. There were async discussions like https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 and https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/495 https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/495 . (Side note, I love the contrast between Mozilla's helpful in-depth feedback and WebKit's... less helpful feedback.) There was also a bit of a debacle where the W3C Technical Architecture Group tried to give "feedback" but the feedback ended up being AI-generated slop... https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1093 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1093 . But overall, yeah, the goal with the prompt API, as with all web APIs, is to put something out there for discussion as early as possible, and get input from the broad community, especially including other browsers, to see if it's something that they are interested in collaborating on. https://www.chromium.org/blink/guidelines/web-platform-changes-guidelines/ https://www.chromium.org/blink/guidelines/web-platform-chang... (which I also wrote) goes into how the Chromium project thinks about such collaboration in general.
- zeratax 5mo ago
  > but the feedback ended up being AI-generated slop... Wow yeah the feedback is actually useless ai generated slop. Has that happened before?
  - domenicd 5mo ago
    Something similar happened with another API recently. https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1198#issuecomment-4167532657 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1198#issueco...

svieira 5mo ago

Congratulations on retiring!