OpenAI · First MLX build 14 Dec 2025

whisper-base.en

MLX Audio apache-2.0

A 72M parameter speech recognition model from OpenAI, with 3 MLX builds, from 4-bit to fp16.

Hugging Face
Parameters
72M
From Hugging Face
Quantisation
4-bit
whisper-base.en-4bit
Memory needed
3 GB
Estimate, unified memory
Download
42 MB
Weights, estimated
Downloads
29
This build, last 30 days
Task
Speech recognition
Audio
MLX builds
3
On mlx-community
Devices
Mac
Apple silicon

Memory

Estimated from the size of the weights, plus a fifth for context and working memory and 2 GB for macOS and your apps. Long contexts need more.

Run it

Terminal · Hugging Face CLI
$ pip install -U huggingface_hub
$ hf download mlx-community/whisper-base.en-4bit

MLX builds

3 on mlx-community
Click a column to sort. Smallest size and most downloads are highlighted.
whisper-base.en-4bit 4-bit 42 MB 3 GB 29
whisper-base.en-8bit 8-bit 77 MB 3 GB 15
whisper-base.en-fp16 fp16 144 MB 3 GB 24

Sizes are estimated from Hugging Face’s parameter counts and the quantisation. Downloads are for the last 30 days.