A Coding Guide to Cactus Whistle: Does a 16.9 MB Speech Model Hold Up Against Whisper Base? Word Error Rate, Speed, Streaming, Timestamps, Keywords, and Speech-to-Tool Calls on a CPU

In this tutorial, we use Whistle, Cactus Compute’s speech-to-text model, a 16.9 MB file that runs on a CPU, transcribes seven languages, and returns word timestamps and probabilities. The model card claims it beats Whisper base on LibriSpeech; we test it on seeded test-clean and test-other samples, comparing Whistle with Whisper tiny and base on…

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Perplexity and NVIDIA Researchers Introduce JOLT: a Joint Teacher-Student Reinforcement Learning Method

Perplexity, along with NVIDIA team, has introduced JOLT, a new post-training method for language models. JOLT stands for Joint On-policy Learning and Teaching. It trains a single model in 2 roles. The teacher sees privileged information; the student does not. The key change is that the teacher is trained too, so its feedback stays usable….

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Tesla says it will start selling Cybercabs by end of year

Tesla said Wednesday it will start selling its Cybercab to customers by the end of the year, even as federal regulators investigate whether the vehicle meets vehicle safety standards. The gold-hued, autonomous two-seater lacks a steering wheel and other traditional controls. During the company’s third-quarter earnings call, Lars Moravy, vice president of engineering at Tesla,…

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