Speech-to-text is transcriptive, it spends its parameters on encoding a mapping from one domain to another. Language models are generative, they spend their par

Speech-to-text is transcriptive, it spends its parameters on encoding a mapping from one domain to another. Language models are generative, they spend their parameters on trying to encode a domain. It might seem like speech-to-text should need more because it cares about two domains (“speech” and “text”) while language models only care about one domain (“text”), but it turns out mappings are much smaller than domains.