According to the technical paper (https://goo.gle/GeminiPaper), Gemini Nano-1, the smallest model at 1.8B parameters, beats Whisper large-v3 and Google's USM at automatic speech recognition. That's very impressive.
and whisper large is 1.55B parameters at 16bits instead of 4 bits, I believe. so nano-1 weights are ~1/3rd the size. Really impressive if these benchmarks are characteristic of performance