12 million tokens, linear cost: Subquadratic's bet against the attention tax

The quadratic attention problem has quietly shaped everything you've built with LLMs. RAG pipelines, agentic decomposition, hybrid architectures — these aren't the natural shape of AI systems. They're workarounds. Doubling the context quadruples the compute, so everyone stopped at a million tokens and engineered around the rest. Subquadratic, a Miami-based startup with 11 PhD researchers on staff, launched its first model this week and says it's done with workarounds. Its new architecture — Subq