The shift isn't new. Kimi K2, a 1T model came out July last year. I am happy that more labs are following the trend as its important for competitive open models to exist.
And DeepSeek has been making huge progress on efficiency, and publishing about, so they came with a 1.6T model that is both fast and cheap to run.
Also DeepSeek R1 was announced 1.5 years ago with ~0.7T parameters, which was a huge model back then.