What GPU do I need to run openai/whisper-large-v3?
1.5B parameters, published in F16. View on Hugging Face
whisper-large-v3 is published by openai on Hugging Face, with 4,615,793 downloads and 6,171 likes to date. It's a WhisperForConditionalGeneration model built for automatic-speech-recognition, published natively in F16.
VRAM required & cheapest live GPU fit
Required VRAM = weight size at each precision, plus a fixed overhead for activations and allocator fragmentation. Speech models don't build the same growing KV-cache a text model does — memory scales primarily with input audio length. Full formula and assumptions: methodology.
A GPU is only matched to a row if its hardware supports that precision, and the primary recommendation is always a single-GPU fit when one exists.
INT4 caveat: requires a quantized checkpoint actually published for this model — check its Hugging Face page before relying on this row.
Cheapest way to run whisper-large-v3 at its published (F16) precision: 1× P4 on akash, at $0.032/hr per GPU ($0.032/hr total). Quantizing to FP8 or INT4 (rows above) can cost less, but requires a compatible quantized checkpoint to exist for this model.
Weight-to-VRAM math, the fit rules, and how live prices are normalized: full methodology.
More openai models
- whisper-large-v3-turbo (809M, F16)
- whisper-small (242M, F32)
- Qwen3-0.6B (752M, BF16)
- Qwen3-8B (8.2B, BF16)
- gpt2 (137M, F32)
- Qwen3.5-9B (9.7B, BF16)
