Models may hit 20T parameters this year, making inference the last moat

burkov · x · 2026-07-21

The post predicts that if open-weight models are already nearing 3T parameters and the rumored Fable model is 6–8T, then models above 20T parameters could appear by year-end.

The author argues that inference for models this large may become the only remaining moat.
Training corpora are also said to be measured in tens of trillions of tokens.
The implication is roughly one floating-point number per token, which the author suggests may be enough to absorb the corpus without loss.

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Models may hit 20T parameters this year, making inference the last moat

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