Been pondering over this a ton recently. WebGPU not only represents higher-end rendering in a browser, but true cross-platform compute that will increasingly get closer and closer to native performance. This is huge, because it comes with the portability aspect as well.

Where I think WebGPU has the most promising role to play is in inference of smaller optimized AI models, in client hardware. Users expect software to run anywhere, and for developers being able to deploy a portable binary that "just works" is huge. Not to mention the immense cost savings... now you won't get a massive model, we're going to need the cloud for those for a while yet. But if you can run it locally, why not? And end users spend most of their time in browser these days, so it's obvious to see where this is all headed.