Informally, it feels odd/wrong to see people acting like it's a gap. I've been swimming in the AI stuff for a year so I chose to frame it as cultural mores.
I don't know what you do necessarily, so this broad analogy will sound cartoonish: sort of like questioning why a Windows text editor Github README didn't link to Microsoft.com and explain what Windows was.
I'm not an academic or full time developer, just a humble SRE. I of course agree that Notepad shouldn't need to link to the win32 API docs, but I don't think that's a fair analogy. Even outside of tech, it's generally considered bad form to use an acronym or jargon without defining it at least once or providing a useful reference for disambiguation. When you're dealing with a piece of tech with a name that overlaps with many unrelated things, that notion also applies. Furthermore, I would say that it is useful to almost no one to have a project description for something like Notepad that doesn't include the words "text editor". This trend of projects that don't have any indication of what they do harms discoverability for people that might find them useful, and really needs to stop, IMHO.
You can call it an accessibility issue. Depending on one's audience, is it or is it not fair to assume that they know what some specific term or idea means?
They can link to Whisper, they can describe what Whisper is for for anyone who has never heard of that within the context of AI before, but do they also need to provide disambiguations for what "AI" means? Or distillation? model? inference?
There are those who might argue (and those like me who merely take a Tellarite stance https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tellarite) that they can define the audience for their paper by who would actually choose to use the model that they made or who might try to further refine it. Specifying the audience that way does a fair job of singling out people who don't know what the word "AI" means, and may or may not do a good job filtering out people who have never heard of "Whisper" in the context of AI before. Because who is trying to get a more efficient version of a model they've never before encountered or thought about?
Allow me to clarify: the opening line of a project should do the following:
- Inform them what the project does.
- Indicate what the audience should be.
- Provide enough context so that the definitions of further acronyms and jargon can be returned by a search engine.
In my mind, "Whisper is an artificial intelligence voice recognition framework for research and incorporation into other software" would accomplish these things neatly. It need not be as overly verbose as you suggest.
