Justy: Okay, so Subquadratic says they cracked the attention bottleneck with SubQ.
Cody: Right. And the first thing I thought was— here we go again with the ‘transformer is obsolete’ takes.
Justy: Mm-hm.
Cody: Dense attention’s quadratic scaling is a real problem, but claiming linear time while matching SOTA on coding… that’s a HUGE ask.
Justy: But Appen’s third-party evals back the speed and cost numbers.
Cody: Sure, and I don’t doubt they’ve got — the numbers are too clean to be fake. But ‘replacing transformers in a few years’?
Cody: That’s the part that smells like marketing.
Justy: I mean, even if it’s only good for long-context document analysis and codebases…
Justy: Companies are drowning in that stuff. If SubQ can do 12x the context at a fraction of the cost, that’s a product.
Cody: Yeah, for workload. Not for general chat.
Justy: Right. And I’ll bet you a coffee that’s where the real money is anyway.
Cody: You’re probably right. But I’m still stuck on the ‘AI Theranos’ vibes from the initial drop.
Justy: That was Dan McAteer’s line, not yours.
Cody: Fair. But the lack of open weights or a repo doesn’t help.
Justy: They’re sharing more now— Appen’s results, some architecture details.
Cody: Okay, but until I can run it myself, I’m reserving judgment.
Justy: And yet you’re the one who’s been yelling about attention complexity for years.
Cody: Yeah, yeah. I want this to be real.
Cody: I just don’t want it to be real yet.
Justy: So what’s the actual gap? The math or the hype?
Cody: Both. The math checks out for tasks— but the hype’s pretending it’s a universal solve.
Justy: And you think that’s a problem.
Cody: It’s a problem if people start betting their stack on it before the edges are stress-tested.
Justy: So your take: SubQ’s legit for niche use cases, but the ‘new age of efficiency’ framing is premature.
Cody: Bingo. And I’ll eat my hat if this replaces transformers across the board in two years.
Justy: Noted. Meanwhile, I’m just excited someone’s finally shipping something that might unclog the context pipe.
Cody: Sure. And if it pans out, I’ll be first in line to call it a win.
Justy: Good. Because remember when you said continuity would ruin your brand?
Cody: Don’t start.
Justy: Well, here’s a prediction you can stand by: SubQ’s going to be a thing for long-horizon tasks, even if it’s not the thing.
Cody: I’ll allow it.
Justy: Alright. Later, Cody.