OpenAI publishes Whisper under an MIT license

OpenAI released Whisper on 21 September 2022, a speech-recognition system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio collected from the web. Both the code and the pretrained weights were published under the permissive MIT license.

Why it mattered Whisper was one of the few OpenAI systems released with open weights and code, and it was widely adopted for transcribing speech and translating it into English.