graphcore/whisper-ai

This project is a hardware-specific port of OpenAI's Whisper model. With only 3 stars and 0 forks over nearly three years, it has failed to gain any meaningful traction even within the niche community of Graphcore IPU users. Its defensibility is near zero because it is essentially a reference implementation provided by the hardware vendor (Graphcore) to demonstrate compatibility. In the broader ASR market, it is being crushed by generic but highly optimized implementations like 'faster-whisper' and 'whisper.cpp' which support ubiquitous hardware (NVIDIA, Apple Silicon, CPU). Furthermore, Graphcore's own market position as a hardware manufacturer has been precarious, recently being acquired by SoftBank after struggling to compete with NVIDIA's H100/B200 dominance. Frontier labs like OpenAI already provide Whisper as a highly subsidized API, removing the need for most developers to manage specialized hardware infrastructure for ASR. Any potential user would likely prefer a more maintained and flexible library over a stagnant, hardware-locked implementation.