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> ...in the future new functionality will likely be added to take advantage of your GPU in other ways, such as training ML models and then using them via an inference engine all powered by your local GPU?

Yes.

> Is the reason you can't accomplish that today bc APIs haven't been created or opened up to allow such workloads? Are there not lower level APIs available/exposed today in WebGPU that would allow developers to begin the design of browser based ML frameworks/libraries?

That is correct, there is no way before WebGPU to access compute capability of GPU hardware through the Web. There have been some hacks based on WebGL, but those are seriously limited. The fragmentation of the existing API space is a major reason we haven't seen as much progress on this.

> Was it possible to interact with the GPU before WebGPU via Web Assembly?

Only in limited ways through WebGL - no access to workgroup shared memory, ability to do random access writes to storage buffers, etc.

> Other than ML and graphics/games (and someone is probably going to mention crypto), are there any other potentially novel uses for WebGPU?

Yes! There is research on doing parallel compilers on GPU (Aaron Hsu's co-dfns as well as Voetter's work[1]). There's quite a bit of work on implementing Fourier transforms at extremely high throughput. Obviously, physics simulations and other scientific workloads are a good fit. To me, it feels like things are wide open.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3528416.3530249

> Was it possible to interact with the GPU before WebGPU via Web Assembly?

Only with tons of restrictions by going through WebGL, or by writing your own or extending an existing WASM runtime outside the browser which connects to system-native GPU APIs like D3D12, Vulkan or Metal.

> are there any other potentially novel uses for WebGPU

In general, the only thing that WebGPU has over calling into D3D12, Vulkan or Metal directly is that it provides a common subset of those 3 APIs (so you don't need to write 2 or 3 implementations to cover all popular operating systems) and it's easier to use (at least compared to D3D12 and Vulkan).

WebGPU is an important step into the right direction, but not a 'game changer' per se (at least outside the browser).

> GPU in other ways, such as training ML models and then using them via an inference engine all powered by your local GPU?

Have a look at wonnix https://github.com/webonnx/wonnx

A WebGPU-accelerated ONNX inference run-time written 100% in Rust, ready for native and the web