Yes. You still need similar ones if you want to run the models really fast, but not nearly the same amount or cost. That’s how people run LLMs on their laptops. You don’t even need a GPU, a multi-core CPU is sufficient, just not very fast at it.

Has nothing to do with bending the knee. The executive order literally changed the official name of the Gulf in the U.S. This situation is ridiculous, but it is the new U.S. government that you need to complain about, not the people implementing or deferring to their decisions.

People that didn’t vote for Kamala gave you Trump.

Untrue. There are small models that produce better output than the previous “flagships” like GPT-2. Also, you can achieve much more than we currently do with far less energy by working on novel, specialised hardware (neuromorphic computing).