> 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.)