alt Hacker NewsYeah that's a massive assumption they're making. I remember musk revealed Grok was multiple trillion parameters. I find it likely Opus is larger.
I'm sure Anthropic is making money off the API but I highly doubt it's 90% profit margins.
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You can estimate on tok/second
The Trillions of parameters claim is about the pretraining.
It’s most efficient in pre training to train the biggest models possible. You get sample efficiency increase for each parameter increase.
However those models end up very sparse and incredibly distillable.
And it’s way too expensive and slow to serve models that size so they are distilled down a lot.
GPT 4 was rumoured/leaked to be 1.8T. Claude 3.5 Sonnet was supposedly 175B, so around 0.5T-1T seems reasonable for Opus 3.5. Maybe a step up to 1-3T for Opus 4.0
Since then inference pricing for new models has come down a lot, despite increasing pressure to be profitable. Opus 4.6 costs 1/3rd what Opus 4.0 (and 3.5) costs, and GPT 5.4 1/4th what o1 costs. You could take that as indication that inference costs have also come done by at least that degree.
My guess would have been that current frontier models like Opus are in the realm of 1T params with 32B active
Anthropic CEO said 50%+ margins in an interview. I'm guessing 50 - 60% right now.
> I find it likely Opus is larger.
Unlikely. Amazon Bedrock serves Opus at 120tokens/sec.
If you want to estimate "the actual price to serve Opus", a good rough estimate is to find the price max(Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM) and multiply it by 2-3. That would be a pretty close guess to actual inference cost for Opus.
It's impossible for Opus to be something like 10x the active params as the chinese models. My guess is something around 50-100b active params, 800-1600b total params. I can be off by a factor of ~2, but I know I am not off by a factor of 10.