Schematic of our hybrid sentiment analysis pipeline: transformer encoders generate fixed-length embeddings that feed into machine learning classifiers. Credit: Procedia Computer Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2025.03.161 Artificial intelligence is accelerating at breakneck speed, with larger models dominating the scene—more parameters, more data, more power. But here is the real question: Do we really need bigger to be better? We challenged that assu