A lack of political statement by those with the power to help remedy is a statement of politics all on its own.

This is screaming into the the ether, but I’ll point out that this is not how GPT, or transformer architectures in general, work. You are describing a basic ass bag of words vectorization model, which is certainly in the lineage of transformers but is absolutely not the end of it. What made transformers such an inflection point in NLP is the development of the attention mechanism. It is still generating an iterative and sequential probabilistic series of tokens, but those probabilities are informed by context and attention along a huge scaffold of parameters that encode a lot of semantics. This isn’t exactly how humans reason, but it’s distressingly not that far off either.

That is all to say, this is still a terrible idea but, no, models are not just “hurr durr weighted averages hurr durr” and it’s been over a decade since that was even remotely at the forefront of NLP.

I think there’s plenty blame to be laid at the feet of data center owners and local permitting morons, for sure. That said, at the end of the day, National Grid NA has posted year on year record profits and continues to argue that price hikes are necessary due to short term fuel cost spikes. Meanwhile, regulators and legislators insist that we need to “negotiate” pricing when most of the infrastructure and labor for generation and transmission is subsidized by the state, is a critical infrastructure, and the operators are still fully capable of netting immense profit despite everything. It just doesn’t make sense. They are not going to go away because their profits are fewer billions this year than last year’s billions, and if they did, it would be more than fine for the state to step in and take over in providing critical infrastructure for the operation of society, even if it is a cost center, because it’s one of the key fucking reasons humans collect into cooperative society in the first place.

Then what’s the point of this article? Machine learning has been a critical aspect of drug discovery for a decade+ now. Anthropic is built on a cornerstone of transformer models. Presumably, they are wanting to implement a transformer based approach to drug discovery otherwise this is absolutely nothing new and that’s a TERRIBLE idea.

Why are residential and critical infrastructure electric rates uncapped? Prices should not be allowed to be hiked. The material ability to produce the electricity is there no matter what and demand is functionally inelastic–this price hiking doesn’t cover any increase in cost of production, it just goes directly to utility company profit lines. We need to stop fucking negotiating with power companies.