Notes from the research desk.
Plain-language research on deals, capital and the markets underneath them, from the Platinum Partnership's editorial team. Written for operators. Never advice.
Latest notes
Inference vs. Training: The Real Capital Allocation Question
Two different markets, two different unit economics, and two different investable theses.The AI Picks-and-Shovels Layer
Where capital has under-invested while the headline names took the spotlight.Model Serving Architectures: The Inference Infrastructure Layer
Training gets the headlines. Inference pays the bills.Specialty Silicon Beyond Nvidia: Where the Alternatives Stand
The GPU monoculture is cracking. Three structural shifts are rewriting who owns the compute stack.Model Distillation: The Practical Economics
Smaller models, cheaper tokens, harder trade-offs than the benchmarks suggest.Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Reality Check
The gap between RAG's early promise and production reality is where the interesting structural bets are forming.Synthetic Data Generation as a Business
Synthetic data has moved from research workaround to a structured commercial layer inside the AI supply chain.Fine-Tuning vs. Prompting: An Economics Question
Most organizations are paying for fine-tuning when a better system prompt would do the job.Edge Inference: Real Use Cases, Real Constraints
On-device inference is solving real latency and privacy problems — and hitting real walls in compute budget and model size.Datacenter Cooling at AI Density
AI cluster density is making conventional HVAC obsolete — and the capital required to replace it is not yet priced into most development timelines.AI Training Run Economics, Year by Year
Compute costs are falling faster than capabilities are plateauing, and that asymmetry is reshaping who can afford to play.
One question per note, worked through plainly.
Each note takes one thing an operator or investor actually runs into, a deal mechanic, a rule, a shift in a market, and works through it without jargon or hype.
The notes are published by Platinum Research, the editorial desk of the Platinum Partnership, and grouped by topic so you can follow one thread.
These notes are education, not advice
They express general market views and educational commentary. They are not financial, investment, legal, tax or accounting advice, not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and not personalized to your circumstances. Markets are uncertain and capital can be lost in part or in whole. Speak with your own licensed professionals before acting on anything here.
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