Architecture Meets Alpha

Where Architecture Meets Alpha

Bridging the gap between frontier AI architecture and investment decision-making. Our research deconstructs model design, GPU economics, and inference infrastructure across the US-China AI landscape, turning engineering breakthroughs into actionable intelligence for capital allocators.

Analysis Framework Interactive

AI Architecture Efficiency Framework

A quantitative toolkit distilled from 15 reports of architectural analysis. Five modules: KV compression ratio, Roofline shift, bit-width leverage, Q-KV asymmetry, and hardware concurrency. They translate micro-architectural decisions into macro-economic outcomes. Includes an interactive Roofline calculator that maps any model × hardware combination to its memory-bound or compute-bound regime in real time.

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Research Library

Research Reports

From DeepSeek's $30M training cost disruption to the MoE/MLA architectural revolution, from the US-China export control chess game to the AI inference pricing war. This series tracks the 18-month inflection that reshaped large model economics, open-source strategy, and hardware sovereignty. 15+ reports and analytical models spanning LLM model architecture, GPU infrastructure, agent ecosystems, and embodied AI, each dissecting the technical decisions that create (or destroy) investment alpha.

Research #15 April 27, 2026 Interactive

DeepSeek V4: Architecture & Performance Deep Dive

An interactive deep-dive into DeepSeek V4-Pro's 1.6T/49B MoE architecture, Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) dimension explosion, CSA/HCA hybrid compression, and quantitative performance modeling across H100/H200/H800/B200 hardware. Includes live calculator and SVG architecture blueprint.

DeepSeekV4-ProMLAArchitectureInteractive
Research #14 March 11, 2026

The Qwen Exodus: Can China's Open-Source AI Dominance Survive a Leadership Vacuum?

Alibaba's Qwen family has become the de facto standard foundation for AI development in Asia, Southeast Asia, and increasingly, the global South. With over 200,000 HuggingFace derivatives and approxim...

AlibabaQwenOpen SourceLeadership
Research #13 March 3, 2026

The Distillation Debate: Separating Signal From Noise in the US-China AI Capability Transfer Controversy

The discovery of 16 million API exchanges between Chinese AI companies and US frontier models has triggered a firestorm of policy debate, venture capital hand-wringing, and diplomatic posturing. But t...

DistillationUS-ChinaRLPolicy
Research #12 January 16, 2026

DeepSeek's mHC vs. ByteDance's DLCM: Two Paths to Architectural Efficiency Under Silicon Constraints

Two distinct architectural philosophies have emerged in 2025-2026 to address the fundamental constraint facing non-US AI developers: silicon scarcity. DeepSeek's Manifold-Constrained Hyper Connections...

DeepSeekByteDanceArchitecturemHC
Research #11 December 17, 2025

DeepSeek V3.2: How Sparse Attention and Scalable RL Are Closing the Gap With GPT-5

DeepSeek's V3.2 release represents a fundamental inflection point in the sparse attention frontier. By combining Dynamic Sparse Attention (DSA) with a novel scalable reinforcement learning framework, ...

DeepSeekSparse AttentionV3.2RL
Research #10 November 17, 2025

Kimi K2's Native INT4 Revolution: How Moonshot Is Turning Hardware Constraints Into Architectural Advantage

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 represents a critical inflection point in AI systems design: the deliberate embrace of hardware constraints as architectural directives. Rather than designing models for theoreti...

MoonshotKimi K2INT4Quantization
Research #09 October 3, 2025

Alibaba's Qwen Ecosystem: Evaluating the "Open-Source Android of AI" Strategy and Its Enterprise Readiness

Alibaba's Qwen ecosystem has emerged as one of the most strategically ambitious open-source AI initiatives globally, positioning itself as an alternative to proprietary foundation models dominated by ...

AlibabaQwenOpen SourceEcosystem
Research #08 September 24, 2025

The Great GPU Migration: Realistic Timelines and Technical Roadblocks in China's Nvidia-to-Ascend Transition

China's strategic pivot from Nvidia to domestic GPUs (Huawei Ascend, Cambricon, Ali T-head) is technically feasible but not frictionless. The transition is neither a binary replacement nor a multi-yea...

NvidiaHuawei AscendMigrationCUDA
Research #07 August 7, 2025

The Economics of AI Inference: Why Most Open-Source Model Hosting Is a Money-Losing Proposition

The AI inference market is in the midst of a silent profitability crisis that will reshape the competitive landscape within 12-24 months. Detailed server economics reveal that operating commodity 120B...

InferenceGPU EconomicsCost AnalysisH100
Research #06 July 25, 2025

Humanoid Robotics Intelligence: Why the East-West VLA Paradigm Split May Define the Next Decade of Embodied AI

The humanoid robotics market has bifurcated into two technically incompatible visions, and this divergence will likely determine which regions dominate embodied AI through 2035. The Western approach—e...

RoboticsVLAHumanoidEmbodied AI
Research #05 May 19, 2025

DeepSeek R2: The 1.2 Trillion Parameter Bet on Multimodal AI and Hardware Sovereignty

DeepSeek's R2 represents a fundamental shift in large language model architecture and a strategic repositioning around hardware sovereignty. The model marks the company's evolution from specialized re...

DeepSeekMultimodalAscendR2
Research #04 May 2, 2025

MCP: The Universal Standard That May Accidentally Lock In the Next Decade of AI Agent Infrastructure

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), developed by Anthropic as an open standard for connecting AI agents to tools and data sources, has rapidly emerged as a critical infrastructure layer in the AI stack....

MCPAI AgentsInfrastructureCloud
Research #03 April 7, 2025

The Great AI Pricing War: Why Chinese Models at 5% of US Rates Are Reshaping the Global AI Stack

The AI pricing war initiated by DeepSeek and accelerated by Chinese cloud providers represents a structural disruption to the AI infrastructure market that will reshape competitive dynamics and applic...

PricingAPI EconomicsDeepSeekGPU Cloud
Research #02 February 7, 2025

DeepSeek's $30M Disruption: How China's Most Efficient AI Lab Rewrote the Rules of Large Model Economics

DeepSeek represents the most significant disruption to AI economics in the post-transformer era. By developing the 671B-parameter V3 model for approximately $5M in training costs and achieving competi...

DeepSeekMoETraining CostOpen Source
Research #01 December 18, 2024

Baidu's AI Pivot: Can ERNIE and Apollo Go Deliver on China's Largest AI Ecosystem Bet?

Baidu stands at an inflection point in its transformation from a search-dominated business to an integrated AI infrastructure and application provider. With Q3 2024 revenues of $4.78B, the company fac...

BaiduERNIERobotaxiChina AI

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