Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Updated review of Web Neural Network API (Issue #1072)

matatk left a comment (w3ctag/design-reviews#1072)

Hi @anssiko, and thank you for your review request. We have reviewed and discussed the spec, and have the following thoughts...

On [operator naming](https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/issues/821), "2D" is an initialism (for "2 Dimensional" or similar), and so the guidance in https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/#casing-rules says that it should be "All caps, except when the first word in a method or property".

We would appreciate if the WG would evaluate the likely impacts on sustainability from introducing this API, perhaps in collaboration with the [Sustainable Web IG](https://www.w3.org/groups/ig/sustainableweb/). There are several competing likely effects, including the comparative energy efficiency of personal devices vs datacenters, the greater efficiency of WebNN over WebGPU for the same workload, increased use of neural nets as they get easier to access, faster device obsolescence if older devices can't effectively run the workloads this API encourages, and likely other considerations. Any sustainability impacts might be balanced by increased utility and privacy, but it would be good to know what we're signing up for.

It would be good to have official standards positions from Mozilla and Webkit. Simply participating in a WG isn't a reliable signal of the browser engines' support for a feature.

We endorse the concerns that Chrome expressed in https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webnn/issues/453, that WebNN is a proposal that browsers implement a compilation and optimization engine for yet another high level language, on top of the Javascript, Wasm, and WebGPU engines that we've already signed up for. WebNN _might_ be worth doing, but it's a relatively high cost, and we'd like some evidence that it's going to pay off.

Inkeeping with the above questions and concerns, we are closing this review as satisfied with concerns, and look forward to hearing in due course with regards to sustainability, and the other issues raised above, as you continue to develop this work.

Finally, we also want to acknowledge the great and valuable work that your group has done in creating the [Ethical Principles for Web Machine Learning](https://www.w3.org/TR/webmachinelearning-ethics/) - thank you!

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