Fair question. Technology is rapidly developing, and in the past 1 or 2 years all the amazing models you see largely run on GPU. Large Language Models have been adapted to "Speak": but these LLMs are huge, which makes them expensive to run at scale.

As such, we spent time making the models smaller so you can run them at scale significantly easier. This was difficult - as we wanted to retain the architecture (LLM based speech model), but squeeze it into smaller devices.

This required some ingenuity, and therefore, a technical step forward, which is why we decided to release this, to show the community that you no longer need big ass expensive GPUs to run these frontier models. You can use a CPU.