# Running models on WebGPU

WebGPU is a new web standard for accelerated graphics and compute. The [API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API) enables web developers to use the underlying system's GPU to carry out high-performance computations directly in the browser. WebGPU is the successor to [WebGL](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGL_API) and provides significantly better performance, because it allows for more direct interaction with modern GPUs. Lastly, it supports general-purpose GPU computations, which makes it just perfect for machine learning!

> [!WARNING]  
> As of October 2024, global WebGPU support is around 70% (according to [caniuse.com](https://caniuse.com/webgpu)), meaning some users may not be able to use the API.
>
> If the following demos do not work in your browser, you may need to enable it using a feature flag:
>
> - Firefox: with the `dom.webgpu.enabled` flag (see [here](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Experimental_features#:~:text=tested%20by%20Firefox.-,WebGPU%20API,-The%20WebGPU%20API)).
> - Safari: with the `WebGPU` feature flag (see [here](https://webkit.org/blog/14879/webgpu-now-available-for-testing-in-safari-technology-preview/)).
> - Older Chromium browsers (on Windows, macOS, Linux): with the `enable-unsafe-webgpu` flag (see [here](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/webgpu/troubleshooting-tips)).

## Usage in Transformers.js v3

Thanks to our collaboration with [ONNX Runtime Web](https://www.npmjs.com/package/onnxruntime-web), enabling WebGPU acceleration is as simple as setting `device: 'webgpu'` when loading a model. Let's see some examples!

**Example:** Compute text embeddings on WebGPU ([demo](https://v2.scrimba.com/s06a2smeej))

```js
import { pipeline } from "@huggingface/transformers";

// Create a feature-extraction pipeline
const extractor = await pipeline(
  "feature-extraction",
  "mixedbread-ai/mxbai-embed-xsmall-v1",
  { device: "webgpu" },
);

// Compute embeddings
const texts = ["Hello world!", "This is an example sentence."];
const embeddings = await extractor(texts, { pooling: "mean", normalize: true });
console.log(embeddings.tolist());
// [
//   [-0.016986183822155, 0.03228696808218956, -0.0013630966423079371, ... ],
//   [0.09050482511520386, 0.07207386940717697, 0.05762749910354614, ... ],
// ]
```

**Example:** Perform automatic speech recognition with OpenAI whisper on WebGPU ([demo](https://v2.scrimba.com/s0oi76h82g))

```js
import { pipeline } from "@huggingface/transformers";

// Create automatic speech recognition pipeline
const transcriber = await pipeline(
  "automatic-speech-recognition",
  "onnx-community/whisper-tiny.en",
  { device: "webgpu" },
);

// Transcribe audio from a URL
const url =
  "https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xenova/transformers.js-docs/resolve/main/jfk.wav";
const output = await transcriber(url);
console.log(output);
// { text: ' And so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' }
```

**Example:** Perform image classification with MobileNetV4 on WebGPU ([demo](https://v2.scrimba.com/s0fv2uab1t))

```js
import { pipeline } from "@huggingface/transformers";

// Create image classification pipeline
const classifier = await pipeline(
  "image-classification",
  "onnx-community/mobilenetv4_conv_small.e2400_r224_in1k",
  { device: "webgpu" },
);

// Classify an image from a URL
const url =
  "https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xenova/transformers.js-docs/resolve/main/tiger.jpg";
const output = await classifier(url);
console.log(output);
// [
//   { label: 'tiger, Panthera tigris', score: 0.6149784922599792 },
//   { label: 'tiger cat', score: 0.30281734466552734 },
//   { label: 'tabby, tabby cat', score: 0.0019135422771796584 },
//   { label: 'lynx, catamount', score: 0.0012161266058683395 },
//   { label: 'Egyptian cat', score: 0.0011465961579233408 }
// ]
```

## Reporting bugs and providing feedback

Due to the experimental nature of WebGPU, especially in non-Chromium browsers, you may experience issues when trying to run a model (even if it can run in WASM). If you do, please open [an issue on GitHub](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.js/issues/new?title=[WebGPU]%20Error%20running%20MODEL_GOES_HERE&assignees=&labels=bug,webgpu&projects=&template=1_bug-report.yml) and we'll do our best to address it. Thanks!