How large are large language models?

This is a really nice writeup.

That said, there's an unstated assumption here that these truly large language models are the most interesting thing. The big players have been somewhat quiet but my impression from the outside is that OpenAI let a little bit leak with their behavior. They built an even larger model and it turned out to be disappointing so they quietly discontinued it. The most powerful frontier reasoning models may actually be smaller than the largest publicly available models.