NLP Lineage

21 September 2022 · Language modelling

Whisper

Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision

A. Radford, J. Kim, T. Xu, G. Brockman, C. McLeavey, I. Sutskever

Date
21 September 2022
What the date marks
Model release
Kind
Model
Organisation
OpenAI
Access
MIT
Other dates
paper 2022-12-06
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
Learning phases
6. Local models and deployment

Notable: no later milestone in the data is documented as descending from it. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (openai.com)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

Speech recognition models were trained on small curated corpora and fine-tuned per domain.

The problem

They broke on accents, noise and languages outside their training set.

What it introduced

680,000 hours of weakly supervised multilingual audio, trained as a single sequence-to-sequence model.

Why it matters

It made robust open speech recognition a commodity, which is the input side of every voice assistant built since.

What modern models inherit

Speech as just another sequence task for a transformer.

What came next

Voice interfaces on top of LLMs, then natively audio-capable models like GPT-4o.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

Whisper has 10 documented ancestors across 3 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 4 turning points among them.

Whisper has 10 documented ancestors across 3 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Whisper has 11 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 3 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 4 turning points among them.

Whisper has 11 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 3 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2022WhisperThis milestone.
  2. 2017Transformer Turning pointWhisper built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  3. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  4. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  5. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  6. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  7. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  8. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  9. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  10. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  11. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2022WhisperThis milestone.
  2. 2017Transformer Turning pointWhisper built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  3. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  4. 2016Layer normTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  5. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  6. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  7. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  8. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  9. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  10. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  11. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  12. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

No documented descendants are recorded for Whisper without weak links.

No documented descendants are recorded for Whisper without weak links.

Whisper has 21 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 6 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

Whisper has 21 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 6 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2022WhisperThis milestone.
  2. 2024GPT-4owas influenced by Whisper (indirect influence)Chapter 11. Seeing and hearing
  3. 2024DeepSeek-V3was influenced by GPT-4oChapter 8. The weights get out
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1built directly on DeepSeek-V3Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2025GPT-4.5built directly on GPT-4oChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  6. 2025Qwen3was influenced by DeepSeek-R1Chapter 8. The weights get out
  7. 2025Kimi K2was influenced by DeepSeek-V3 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2025gpt-osswas influenced by DeepSeek-R1 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2025GPT-5succeeded GPT-4oChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  10. 2025GLM-4.5was influenced by DeepSeek-R1 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  11. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2built directly on DeepSeek-V3Chapter 10. Reading more than you remember
  12. 2025GPT-5.1built directly on GPT-5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  13. 2025GPT-5.2built directly on GPT-5.1Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  14. 2026GPT-5.3-Codexbuilt directly on GPT-5.2Chapter 13. Models that act
  15. 2026Qwen3.5built directly on Qwen3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  16. 2026GPT-5.4built directly on GPT-5.3-CodexChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  17. 2026GPT-5.5built directly on GPT-5.4Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  18. 2026DeepSeek-V4was influenced by DeepSeek-V3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  19. 2026GLM-5.2built directly on GLM-4.5Chapter 8. The weights get out
  20. 2026GPT-5.6 Solbuilt directly on GPT-5.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  21. 2026Kimi K3built directly on Kimi K2Chapter 8. The weights get out
  22. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

What it led to

Influenced