> this is peer reviewable
It's not peer-reviewable in any shape or form.
It is kind of "peer-reviewable" in the "Elon Musk vs Yann LeCun" form, but I doubt that the original commenter meant this.
Others can build models that try to have decent performance with a lower number of parameters. If they match what is in the paper that is the crudest form of review, but Mistral is releasing some models (this one?) so this can get more nuanced if needs.
That said, doing that is slow and people will need to make decisions before that is done.
We should still be skeptical because often want to claim to be better or have unearned answers, but I don't think the motive to lie is quite as strong as a salesman's.