[anticensor]

Their state-of-the-art speech to text model, Whisper, is available as open weights for free.

[echelon]

Strategically, they know that needs to run at the edge, and they want users to send them requests to their API without incurring latency or bad user experience.

That is still a fair point, though, and it should be commended. And that hasn't been their only contribution, either.

[anticensor]

They could've made it a trusted-computing-only model distributed with a proprietary encryption, unlocked with an expensive licence key if they wanted.