> Lastly, there is a massive difference in capabilities, determinism, and error handling between 5T SOTA models like Opus
What's your source for Opus being a 5T model?
> and tiny distillations from DeepSeek that perform well only in benchmarks.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. Local models aren't “distillations from Deepseek”.
And they don't perform well “only in benchmarks”, Qwen 3.6 is a very decent model (obviously it's not Opus, but it's also much faster and speed is a quality of its own).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24827
From this paper
That's not what the paper says though:
According to their estimation, Opus is likely between 1T and 15T, which really doesn't tell you much that you couldn't have guessed otherwise. It doesn't say “Opus is a 5T model”.The fact that there's absolutely no consistency in the predicted size between models from the same lab should tell you all you need about the predictive power of this method (and they aren't really lying about their numbers, their confidence interval is huge enough to fit anything in it, but their prose is making very strong claims out of their statistical nothingburger).
(somebody already posted this paper earlier, and I spent some time reading it, and this paper is really not that good even though there are a bunch of interesting ideas in it).
> What's your source for Opus being a 5T model?
Elon Musk tweeted that Grok is 0.5T or 1/10th the size of Opus. https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2042123561666855235#m
While this source's reliability is certainly debatable, the size matches the results of this paper, in which researchers estimated the parameter count from model knowledge. https://01.me/research/ikp/
> While this source's reliability is certainly debatable
Massive understatement. Nowadays it has become hard to find a single Musk statement that doesn't contain at least one lie.
> the size matches the results of this paper, in which researchers estimated the parameter count from model knowledge. https://01.me/research/ikp/
Thanks for the pointer. This estimation has Grok 6 times bigger than Musk claims it is, so maybe that's where the lie is.
(I'm quite skeptical about that number though, it would be quite disappointing for the US tech if their flagship models had to be that much larger than the Chinese ones for such a small edge in performance. Because I don't think US labs are incompetent, I'd bet that US flagships aren't more than 2/3 times bigger than Chinese flagship. Otherwise it really doesn't bode well.)
In tiny gray text right above the table is written "90% PI ≈ ±3.00× either side." Is GPT-5.5-Pro 3.4T or 30.8T in size, or somewhere in between? We just don't know.
> What's your source for Opus being a 5T model?
Probably Elon Musk: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3760679047267075
Sigh, it's year 2026 and there are still people believing something Musk says…
People can simultaeneously be reprehensible idiots while being a reliable expert on something they have personally invested billions of dollars into and operate at scale.
> ...while being a reliable expert on something they have personally invested billions of dollars into and operate at scale.
Like "Full Self-Driving" from coast-to-coast by 2016?
He's also invested billions of dollars in SpaceX and Tesla... which he regularly makes wild claims about that are untrue.
I'm not saying he actually is an expert, but he could be an expert and still lie for any number of reasons.
Elon is a specialist of lying about stuff he invested billions in to make it look more valuable than it is (he's been doing that for Tesla for years). It's not a lack of expertise, it's the lack of any sense of integrity (and self respect).
He's lagging the AI race despite having tons of compute available, so he tries to make a narrative about how it's not that the model is behind, it's just smaller than the competition.