> 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 faster 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.

Elon Musk has absolutely no credibility anymore. I'm more likely to believe the opposite of what he claims to be true.

aka the russian strategy

  Elon Musk tweeted

Come on. The Onion would be a more credible source.

Musk has a lot of incentive to explain away how horrible Grok is relative to Opus.

It's certainly a better sell that Grok sucks because it's small and Opus is impressive because it's large, than the alternative that Grok is also large and sucks which points to xAI incompetence and mismanagement.

Particularly when you're trying to IPO a rocket company based on rosy forecasted valuations of Grok dominating the market.