About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training.

Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh.

Then I put it on the shelf.

When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper fine-tuning and added support for Gemma 4.

I'm presenting it for you here today to play with, fork and improve upon.

One thing I have learned so far: It's very easy to OOM when you fine-tune on longer sequences! My local Mac Studio has 64GB RAM, so I run out of memory constantly.

Anywho, given how much interest there is in Gemma 4, and frankly, the fact that you can't really do audio fine-tuning with MLX, that's really the reason this exists (in addition to my personal interest). I would have preferred to use MLX and not have had to make this, but here we are. Welcome to my little side quest.

And so I made this. I hope you have as much fun using it as I had fun making it.

-Matt