It is roughly one four-thousandth the size of a frontier language model, and it sounds better than systems a hundred times larger. Speech turned out to be an easier problem than anyone assumed.
It has 250 million downloads, it is 22 million parameters, and it will never write you a sentence. It may also be doing more real work than anything else on the hub.
The company that spent years arguing against open models now ships them under the most permissive licence there is.
OpenAI's newest flagship and Anthropic's newest flagship are priced identically, to the cent. That is not a coincidence, and it tells you something about where the market has gone.