And do you guys communicate between other browsers when doing something like this to try to settle on something common? I don't mean W3C but practically, it's a small world after all.
The target usage for the prompt API is anything that would benefit from the general capabilities of a language model, and can't be encompassed by the more-specific APIs for summarization/writing/rewriting. Realistic use cases currently are things like sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, etc. I have a number of ideas on how to integrate it into my current retirement project around Japanese flashcards, e.g. generating example sentences. If the small (~10 GiB) model class keeps getting smarter, the class of things possible on-device in this way gets larger and larger over time.
We definitely communicated with other browsers. There were the standing WebML Community Group meetings at the W3C every few weeks. There were async discussions like https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 and https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/495 . (Side note, I love the contrast between Mozilla's helpful in-depth feedback and WebKit's... less helpful feedback.) There was also a bit of a debacle where the W3C Technical Architecture Group tried to give "feedback" but the feedback ended up being AI-generated slop... https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1093 .
But overall, yeah, the goal with the prompt API, as with all web APIs, is to put something out there for discussion as early as possible, and get input from the broad community, especially including other browsers, to see if it's something that they are interested in collaborating on. https://www.chromium.org/blink/guidelines/web-platform-chang... (which I also wrote) goes into how the Chromium project thinks about such collaboration in general.