Yeah seems spotty. Especially considering recent "chinchilla scaling" laws suggesting training set size is generally the current bottleneck, the mileage llama/alpaca gets out of 7b/13b, the huge inference cost of 1T, etc.
Yeah, I'm highly suspicious too. Even the arxiv article from the MS researchers doesn't have specifics about the # of parameters in GPT-4.
Sam altman said it had 1T parameters in the Lex Fridman podcast