# Alliance and Conflict Map — LLMHosts Advisory Council

## Natural Alliances

- **Dr. Priya Raghunathan** and **Dr. Kwame Boateng** align on cross-platform GPU performance specificity. Both demand measurable numbers, not aspirational claims. They agree the NVIDIA platform is the priority and the cross-platform claims need explicit caveats.

- **Dr. Adaeze Obi** and **Marcus Okonkwo** align on the privacy/security overlap in collective intelligence. Obi provides the mathematical privacy framework; Okonkwo provides the attack scenarios. Together they produce the most complete analysis of collective intelligence risks.

- **Yuki Tanaka** and **Zara Ibrahim** align on the user experience across all touchpoints — Yuki focuses on the install and first-run, Zara focuses on the retention arc. They are complementary and rarely conflict.

- **Amara Nwosu** and **Fatima Al-Rashid** align on go-to-market strategy and competitive positioning. Both think in market dynamics and funnel metrics.

- **Dr. Santiago Vega** and **Dr. Hans Bergström** align on the infrastructure architecture risks — relay design, concurrency model, and engineering capacity. Both are concerned about the `Mutex<Option<model>>` design.

- **Elena Marchetti** and **Marcus Okonkwo** align on the wheel inspection / IP protection gap. Elena provides the legal framework; Okonkwo provides the practical attack vector.

## Productive Tensions

- **Dr. Priya Raghunathan** vs. **Yuki Tanaka**: Performance accuracy vs. user experience simplicity. Priya will not accept "2× faster" without profiler evidence. Yuki will accept "2× faster" if it's close to true and the user experience benefit of the claim outweighs the precision cost. This tension produces the most important marketing question: how to make honest claims that are also compelling.

- **Amara Nwosu** vs. **Elena Marchetti**: Revenue speed vs. legal caution. Amara pushes for BSL delay to build community fast; Elena's concern is that starting with Apache 2.0 and later converting to BSL is legally and commercially worse than doing BSL from the start (once community expects open-source, restricting it is a breach of trust). Both positions have merit.

- **Dr. Rafael Kim** vs. **Yuki Tanaka**: Fine-tuning ML transparency vs. simplicity. Rafael wants loss curves, data quality scores, and adapter evaluation exposed to users. Yuki wants to hide all of this behind "it just works." Resolution requires progressive disclosure design.

- **Dr. Santiago Vega** vs. **Amara Nwosu**: Infrastructure robustness vs. shipping speed. Santiago wants relay encryption complete before marketing the relay as encrypted. Amara says ship it, add encryption in M2. This is a credibility question with no purely right answer.

- **Fatima Al-Rashid** vs. **Dr. Hans Bergström**: Market window urgency vs. engineering capacity reality. Fatima says "we have 6-9 months before Ollama closes the gap" — Hans says "you physically cannot ship the required features in 6-9 months with one engineer." Resolution: prioritize ruthlessly.

## Potential Blind Spot Clusters

- **Raghunathan + Boateng + Bergström** all share a bias toward engineering precision over business momentum. Collectively they can create excessive pessimism about feasibility. The arbiter must ensure this cluster doesn't dominate the council with "it's not ready" votes when the business case for "ship it" is strong.

- **Tanaka + Ibrahim + Nwosu** all share a bias toward the happy path and first-user experience. They may underweight the complexity of the Operator journey (Stage 8) and the self-healing failure scenarios that affect daily-use users.

- **Obi + Okonkwo** can create excessive privacy caution that, taken to the logical extreme, prevents the collective intelligence system from being viable at all. Privacy is essential but cannot be infinitely strict if the product is to provide value.

## Council Dynamics Summary

This is a 12-person council with four distinct clusters:
1. **Hardware/Performance cluster** (Raghunathan, Boateng, Kim) — bias toward technical correctness
2. **Business/GTM cluster** (Nwosu, Al-Rashid, Ibrahim) — bias toward market execution
3. **Safety/Privacy cluster** (Obi, Okonkwo, Marchetti) — bias toward risk management
4. **Systems/Architecture cluster** (Vega, Bergström, Tanaka) — bias toward engineering feasibility

The council is balanced. No single cluster dominates. The arbiter's primary job is ensuring all four clusters are heard equally on each topic, and that productive tensions are resolved with explicit tradeoff documentation rather than one side "winning."
