HF is notorious for making it difficult to work offline (or at least not waste time trying to connect when everything needed is offline) and is constantly changing how it is being handled. Previously, there was TRANSFORMERS_OFFLINE, HF_DATASETS_OFFLINE, etc.
This will limit the agent in what it can do in the system and what IPs/domains it can reach. This requires a lot of customization to your specific framework/environment. Note that this can reduce the agent’s effectiveness, as it will have to “work around” some of the limitations. This isn’t foolproof either, and the agent could exfiltrate data e.g. via DNS requests.
It highly depends on the sort of data you’re processing (phone calls, podcasts, meetings of more people recorded using single channel?). For NVIDIA/NeMo, check out their softformer diarization models (also streaming).
It’s a distinction that IMHO likely doesn’t make much difference, at least for the mostly automated/non-interactive coding agent use case. What matters more is how well the post-training on synthetic harness traces works.
There are still opportunities, but they aren’t paid nearly as well as less researchy positions in industry. US post-doc salaries at state universities aren’t that high.
The bank issues/refusals may have something to do with FATCA. If you have anything to do with the US in terms of taxes, many EU banks don’t want you as their customer. If it’s a subsidiary of a foreign company, then a lot of paperwork is required to prove that the foreign owners actually exist.
Jeez, OP asked what it means in this context (zero-shot voice cloning), where you quoted a generic definition copied from Wikipedia. I defined it concretely for this context. Don't take it as a slight, there is no need to get all argumentative.
These days, more like >$4.1K (at least in the US).