=

The passage around this formula

giving $u_1$ $\approx$ 3.16 , $u_2$ = 10 , and $u_3$ $\approx$ 31.6 — which is a formal way of saying that even a well-resourced independent estimate of a frontier training run can be off by an order of magnitude or more, and everyone doing the estimating knows it going in. Epoch’s own account of its Grok 4 figures is direct about why: “the FLOP and GPU-hour estimates for Grok-4 are largely based on public statements from xAI, which are often vague,” producing significant uncertainty in the resulting compute total [ 4 ] . Their published point estimate — roughly 5.0×10²⁶ FLOP, built from about 246 million H100-hours — is a best reconstruction, not a confirmed figure, and Epoch says so on the page.

Read this part in the article →