4 ms·
Try 10s of trillions. These days everyone is running 4-bit at inference (the flagship feature of Blackwell+), with the big flagship models running on recently i
by Chamix 7mo ago
Try 10s of trillions. These days everyone is running 4-bit at inference (the flagship feature of Blackwell+), with the big flagship models running on recently installed Nvidia 72gpu rubin clusters (and equivalent-ish world size for those rented Ironwood TPUs Anthropic also uses). Let's see, Vera Rubin racks come standard with 20 TB (Blackwell NVL72 with 10 TB) of unified memory, and NVFP4 fits 2 parameters per btye...
Of course, intense sparsification via MoE (and other techniques ;) ) lets total model size largely decouple from inference speed and cost (within the limit of world size via NVlink/TPU torrus caps)
So the real mystery, as always, is the actual parameter count of the activated head(s). You can do various speed benchmarks and TPS tracking across likely hardware fleets, and while an exact number is hard to compute, let me tell you, it is not 17B or anywhere in that particular OOM :)
Comparing Opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4 thinking or Gemini 3.1 pro to any sort Chinese model (on cost) is just totally disingenuous when China does NOT have Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs or Ironwood V7 TPUs in any meaningful capacity, and is forced to target 8gpu Blackwell systems (and worse!) for deployment.
- aurareturn 7mo agoChina is targeting H20 because that's all they were officially allowed to buy.
- Chamix 7mo agoI generally agree, back of the napkin math shows H20 cluster of 8gpu * 96gb = 768gb = 768B parameters on FP8 (no NVFP4 on Hopper), which lines up pretty nicely with the sizes of recent open source Chinese models. However, I'd say its relatively well assumed in realpolitik land that Chinese labs managed to acquire plenty of H100/200 clusters and even meaningful numbers of B200 systems semi-illicitly before the regulations and anti-smuggling measures really started to crack down. This does somewhat beg the question of how nicely the closed source variants, of undisclosed parameter counts, fit within the 1.1tb of H200 or 1.5tb of B200 systems.
- aurareturn 7mo agoThey do not have enough H200 or Blackwell systems to server 1.6 billion people and the world so I doubt it's in any meaningful number.
- Chamix 7mo agoI assure you, the number of people paying to use Qwen3-Max or other similar proprietary endpoints is far less than 1.6 billion.
- aurareturn 7mo agoYou don't need to assure me. It's a theoretical maximum.
- jychang 7mo agoNobody is running 10s of trillion param models in 2026. That's ridiculous. Opus is 2T-3T in size at most.
- johndough 7mo agoDo you have any clues to guess the total model size? I do not see any limitations to making models ridiculously large (besides training), and the Scaling Law paper showed that more parameters = more better, so it would be a safe bet for companies that have more money than innovative spirit.
- magicalhippo 7mo ago> I do not see any limitations to making models ridiculously large (besides training) From my understanding, the "besides training" is a big issue. As I noted earlier[1], Qwen3 was much better than Qwen2.5, but the main difference was just more and better training data. The Qwen3.5-397B-A17B beat their 1T-parameter Qwen3-Max-Base, again a large change was more and better training data. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089780
- Chamix 7mo agoWhat do you think labs are doing with the minimum 10TB memory in NvLink 72 systems that were publicly reported to all start coming online in November/December of last year? And why would this 1 TB -> 10 TB jump matter so much for Anthropic previously being wholly dependent on running Opus 4x on TPUs, if the models were 2-3T at 4bit and could fit in 8x B200 (1.5 TB = 3T param) widely deployed during the Opus 4 era? You have presented a vibe-based rebuttal with no evidence or or logic to outline why you think labs are still stuck in the single trillions of parameters (GPT 4 was ~1 trillion params!). Though, you have successfully cunninghammed me into saying that while anything I publicly state is derived from public info, working in the industry itself is a helpful guide to point at the right public info to reference.
- johndough 7mo agoCould you point at some more public info about active parameter count? You said: > and while an exact number is hard to compute, let me tell you, it is not 17B or anywhere in that particular OOM :) I can see ~100B, but that would near the same order of magnitude. I find ~1000B active parameters hard to believe.