Israeli AI startup aiOla has launched an open-source speech recognition model called Whisper-Medusa, which is 50% faster than OpenAI's Whisper. The model is built on Whisper, utilizing an innovative 'multi-head attention' architecture that allows for the prediction of more tokens at once, resulting in a significant speed increase while maintaining accuracy. Whisper-Medusa has been released on Hugging Face under the MIT License, permitting both research and commercial use.