--- title: "A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs" url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-startup-claims-it-broke-through-a-bottleneck-that-s-holding-back-llms-crc4dg053 source_url: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/19/1139313/a-startup-claims-it-broke-through-a-bottleneck-thats-holding-back-llms type: article source: "MIT Technology Review" published: 2026-06-19T11:07:11.040Z updated: 2026-06-19T11:07:36.624Z tags: ["llm"] reading_time: 10 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs **[MIT Technology Review](https://daily.dev/sources/technologyreview)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic claims to have solved the quadratic attention bottleneck that has limited LLMs for nearly a decade. Their model, SubQ, replaces dense attention with a dynamic sparse attention mechanism that selects only relevant token relationships on the fly, rather than computing all pairwise multiplications. Independent evaluator Appen found SubQ to be 56x faster than FlashAttention in speed tests, scored 89.7% on LiveCodeBench (competitive with top coding models), and achieved 98% on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval with context windows up to 12 million tokens — far exceeding the 1 million token windows of most top models. Cost claims are dramatic: $8 vs $2,600 to run a specific benchmark compared to Anthropic's Opus. However, skepticism remains: SubQ is not yet widely available, the company bootstrapped weights from the open-source Qwen model rather than training from scratch, and independent researchers note the public evidence doesn't yet fully justify the strongest claims about solving the quadratic bottleneck. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [A startup says it cracked the bottleneck holding back AI](https://daily.dev/posts/a-startup-says-it-cracked-the-bottleneck-holding-back-ai-a0nvetkis) · The Next Web · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The context window has been shattered: Subquadratic debuts a 12-million-token window](https://daily.dev/posts/the-context-window-has-been-shattered-subquadratic-debuts-a-12-million-token-window-yvkp4iqxr) · The New Stack · 4 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-startup-claims-it-broke-through-a-bottleneck-that-s-holding-back-llms-crc4dg053)