Whisper vs. ThirdAI

We are excited to announce the launch of Whisper, an open-source neural network that delivers accuracy and robustness in English speech recognition that rivals that of human abilities. This automatic speech recognition (ASR) system has been meticulously trained using a vast dataset of 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data sourced from the internet. Our findings indicate that employing such a rich and diverse dataset greatly enhances the system's performance in adapting to various accents, background noise, and specialized jargon. Moreover, Whisper not only supports transcription in multiple languages but also offers translation capabilities into English from those languages. To facilitate the development of real-world applications and to encourage ongoing research in the domain of effective speech processing, we are providing access to both the models and the inference code. The Whisper architecture is designed with a simple end-to-end approach, leveraging an encoder-decoder Transformer framework. The input audio is segmented into 30-second intervals, which are then converted into log-Mel spectrograms before entering the encoder. By democratizing access to this technology, we aspire to inspire new advancements in the realm of speech recognition and its applications across different industries. Our commitment to open-source principles ensures that developers worldwide can collaboratively enhance and refine these tools for future innovations.

ThirdAI, pronounced as "Third eye," is an innovative startup making strides in artificial intelligence with a commitment to creating scalable and sustainable AI technologies. The focus of the ThirdAI accelerator is on developing hash-based processing algorithms that optimize both training and inference in neural networks. This innovative technology is the result of a decade of research dedicated to finding efficient mathematical techniques that surpass conventional tensor methods used in deep learning. Our cutting-edge algorithms have demonstrated that standard x86 CPUs can achieve performance levels up to 15 times greater than the most powerful NVIDIA GPUs when it comes to training large neural networks. This finding has significantly challenged the long-standing assumption in the AI community that specialized hardware like GPUs is vastly superior to CPUs for neural network training tasks. Moreover, our advances not only promise to refine existing AI training methodologies by leveraging affordable CPUs but also have the potential to facilitate previously unmanageable AI training workloads on GPUs, thus paving the way for new research applications and insights. As we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with AI, we invite others in the field to explore these transformative capabilities.