There is nothing to say for example a 1 Quadrillion parameter model will be vastly more intelligent than current SOTA especially since new training data is largely synthetic today
I think there is some merit in that smaller models cannot memorize so much of the training data, i.e. that they are less likely to do copyright infringement, and by analogy not having memorized SDK / API surfaces that have since changed from the training data
You have to rely on it to a certain level for agentic/coding work, presuming that's the general subject we're talking about here... For instance I recently encountered a project where it would have been a lot worse if the LLM didn't already know "what is" xterm.js and a bunch of its associated npm-related/node related software. If it was still smart but had to google and find results for everything it would have been a lot more time consuming and risked sending it down a wrong path.
But these labs distill off the larger models. Both officially at the labs with the big ones, and unofficially. We need the giant models to get the smaller models.
The cost to train and infer that would be insane, even by today's standards.
Eg: https://www.reuters.com/technology/bytedance-targets-mega-ai...
That reports Mythos as 8T and Fable as 5T, but I think they mean Opus as 5T, which is widely known, eg: https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3760679047267075?ref=explainx
Both Grok and Bytedance are training 10T models.
Honestly if Opus is 5T parameters while being matched by the biggest open models that are at least twice smaller, it would mean that the US is already behind China in the AI race, despite a significant edge in compute.
For example I regularly do Fable+Opus agentic coding runs over 24 hours without intervention.
I think I've had GLM do a run that was a few hours. That's the closest I've had an open model come on that kind of work.
This assumption is likely what has led to the erroneous failure.
Enterprise compute per rack has scaled multiple fold in the last 3-5 years. Alongside the training efficiency gains & datacenter scale increases, even 50T+ is well within reach at the top end.