Something I'm personally excited about: colour e-ink displays. There are a few decent colour e-ink tablets on the market already, for surprisingly low prices ($400-500). So far the colour reproduction and refresh rate is still somewhat suboptimal, but development appears to be progressing rapidly. I predict that in a few years there will be little reason to get a conventional tablet over an e-ink one, at least for the “reading and taking notes” use case.
Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
21–30 of 177 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#22WebGPU. It’ll be live in Chromium stable this Thursday and will be the biggest step change for browser-based GPU since the original WebGL.
WebGPU is all the rage right now for hosting AI models in browser :)
This project is doing LLMs of all things with WebGPU too!
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#23[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#24There are a lot of wireless communication improvements related to WiFi and 5G. I think this opens a lot of doors, especially around low power apps. Also, somewhat related: secure anonymous data exchange has a lot of cool possible applications beyond health exposure tracking.
One use case for vastly faster wireless communications: VR headsets. Right now if you use a headset wirelessly you're in for a much worse experience than running a VR application natively on the headset itself. If the headset had a fast enough (and low enough latency) wireless connection to your PC though it'd be an enormous leap forward for the technology.
Most VR application/game developers limit their polygons/resources to that of a mid-range mobile phone because that's about what the stand-alone headsets can deliver in terms of graphics/memory performance. However, if they knew that end users were going to be running their applications with PC-level hardware it would enable a whole heck of a lot more detail, better AI, level generation, and all-around functionality in VR applications/games.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#25We've all pretty much forgotten about AR/VR
But Apple's going to be launching their headset next month
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#26[flagged]
Are they really doing any of those things? Looking at their Twitter, it is mostly retweets of giveaways. Seems pretty spammy and low quality.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#27Neurotech
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#28WebGPU. It’ll be live in Chromium stable this Thursday and will be the biggest step change for browser-based GPU since the original WebGL.
Are WebGPU "libraries" at a point where instead of being recommended Python + PyTorch for neural network training (then exporting the model to ONNX and turning around and loading it and using it)? If not, how far? I've had trouble understanding why the PyTorch "GPU" (CUDA, MPS, etc.) code can't convert to WASM + WebGPU. Something has to be missing/it has to be a huge effort, but in theory you're supposed to be able t…
It can be converted, and can be fairly fast, see Tensorflow.js or https://jott.live/markdown/m1_webgpu_perf. However the any “web” standard will always be a subset of what the hardware can truly provide because it has to support ALL GPU vendors. For example leveraging Nvidia Tensor Cores or Apple’s neural accelerator is not possible. For ML training and inference this means that any webGPU implementation is at least ~3x slower (likely much more) vs an optimized CUDA implementation.
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#29[flagged]
Ouch. That’s a lot
Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
#30One of the questions I've been asking is we've basically had physical servers -> VM -> cloud -> container orchestration on about a decade long cadence. So what's next--especially considering you can argue a lot of the low-level architectural things haven't really changed during that period. But, then, perhaps architectural details don't matter a lot at this point relative to things like AI/ML. Even WASM is mostly in…
I'm excited by the idea of WASM being 'the thing' because it basically boils down to passing raw executables around, and running them in trusted contexts. It's the ultimate end to the cycle of removing all operating systems.