The Inference Report

March 4, 2026

Control is consolidating at the infrastructure layer while fragmenting everywhere else. Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are locking in chip supply and power deals that give them permanent advantage over software vendors trying to build on top. Block cut 40 percent of its workforce because AI tools made its organizational structure obsolete, not because demand collapsed. Railway raised $100 million to challenge AWS by offering AI-native infrastructure. Perplexity announced Computer, an agent that assigns work to other agents. The pattern is unmistakable: whoever controls the orchestration layer controls value extraction.

Military leverage is reshaping commercial terms faster than market forces. The Pentagon forced Anthropic to drop restrictions on military use or lose contracts. OpenAI accepted Pentagon terms that Anthropic rejected and secured the deal. Anthropic has no choice but to comply or exit the government market entirely. Meanwhile, the cost structure of agentic AI is rewriting unit economics in real time. Anthropic's Claude Code costs up to $200 per month. Block released Goose, an open-source alternative, for free. Listen Labs raised $69 million after a viral billboard stunt. The velocity of capability deployment has inverted traditional software economics: shipping fast is cheaper than shipping perfect. But shipping fast at scale requires controlling the infrastructure underneath. That's why Microsoft's stateful AI runtime on AWS matters more than the model itself.

Consumer and enterprise willingness to pay for AI software remains flatlined even as capital pours into infrastructure. Samsung's Galaxy S26 costs more and is "even more chock-full of AI." Google released Nano Banana 2. Amazon made Alexa+ free for Prime members. None of this moves the needle on actual usage or revenue. Data center operators thought they could buy farmland for a million dollars and farmers would sell. They didn't. The political economy of AI is resolving in favor of whoever controls scarcity: chips, power, real estate, military access. Software vendors are margin-squeezed and politically exposed. Infrastructure vendors are consolidating. On coding benchmarks, Claude Code holds the top position at 52.9% on SWE-rebench, while Kimi K2 Thinking climbs from position 26 to position 12 with a 2.9 percentage point gain. Kimi K2.5 shows the largest single-cycle deterioration, dropping 8.9 points.

Grant Calloway

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Research Papers — FocusedAll papers
TWIST: A Proposed Benchmark for Intervention Quality in Conversational Memory, with a Human-Validated Draft-Alignment cs.AI

Long-conversation memory benchmarks increasingly test recall and prompted knowledge updates, and recent work studies evolving user beliefs and memory state. TWIST is a proposed benchmark suite for a complementary, unmeasured property: intervention quality -- whether a deployed memory system, exercised through its own ingest/recall/vet surface, acts correctly at belief change points. Four tracks cover unprompted tension detection, vetting outgoing drafts against the record, answering with current beliefs while preserving supersession history, and governing sensitive recall. The suite extends LoCoMo's corpora and harness, pairing every detect/block metric with a matched do-not-over-detect control: surface-matched hard negatives price false intervention, so no track can be gamed by flagging everything. The benchmark itself is validated first: independent, gold-blind double annotation with adjudication, judge decoy calibration, and a separability audit. On the human-validated Track B v1.0 key (161 items, post-adjudication kappa = 0.85), no tested configuration simultaneously achieves high contradiction recall, high hard-negative specificity, and high attribution: flat-RAG baselines detect 0.76-0.97 of true contradictions but falsely flag 16-43% of surface-matched safe drafts depending on backend, while a deployed coherence-oriented system almost never over-flags (0.98-1.00 specificity) yet catches 42% of true contradictions -- a trade-off no recall-only score can see. A 13-configuration baseline ladder localizes causes: every gold contradiction is detectable from its evidence alone (recall 1.000), calibrated models nearly solve the track given the full transcript -- consistent with substantial retrieval-coverage gaps -- and draft-only floors reveal model-dependent style priors. A system's TWIST profile, beside its recall score, measures whether memory knows when to intervene and when not to.

Learning the Cost of Reliable Inference cs.AI

Benchmarking and routing platforms increasingly act as intermediaries connecting large language model providers with end-users. However, providers on these platforms typically use a fixed price per token, preventing users from achieving the most competitive price for their tasks. In this work, we design a procurement platform where token prices for each task are driven by provider competition, enabling users to secure competitive pricing for guaranteed quality levels. To this end, the platform sequentially routes queries via a reverse second-price auction that incentivizes model providers to truthfully bid their best estimate of the average cost to serve a user's query. As it routes queries, the platform learns the quality offered by each provider and progressively routes queries to the most cost-competitive provider among those meeting a desired quality threshold. To validate our design, we conduct experiments with multiple LLMs from the Llama and Qwen families on popular mathematical reasoning and question-answering benchmarks. The results show that the pricing margin of the most cost-competitive provider on our platform varies significantly---from $10\%$ to $71\%$---depending on the task and quality threshold. This suggests a substantial inefficiency in the current fixed-price market, and it demonstrates that our platform may enable users to capture maximum savings whenever competitive market conditions permit.

Adversarial Closed-Loop Curriculum for Evolving Role-Playing Agents cs.AI

Role-playing agents based on large language models have been widely applied in areas such as personalized assistance and social simulation. Recent RL methods typically train on a fixed scenario pool collected before learning begins. This creates a distributional bottleneck: as the agent improves, the scenarios where it performs poorly also change, while the training distribution remains static. Therefore, we propose AdvRole, an adversarial context rewriting framework that turns role-playing RL into a closed-loop curriculum. AdvRole alternates between an Actor that learns to role-play and a Rewriter that edits character profiles and dialogue contexts into actor-specific hard scenarios. The Rewriter is trained with a performance-gap reward, which favors rewrites that reduce the current Actor's score relative to the original scenario. As a result, the scenario pool evolves with the Actor and continuously targets under-mastered regions of the character-context space. Experiments on three role-playing benchmarks covering English and Chinese, as well as a new multilingual benchmark we release, show that AdvRole consistently outperforms baselines.

Training Object Permanence in World Models cs.AI

Object permanence and solidity are hallmarks of human cognitive priors. Recent studies show that video generation models, a paradigmatic class of current world models, have begun to show emerged reasoning abilities, making them ideal candidates for building human-like physical intelligence. Do video models have emerged object permanence in them? If not, could we train them with a core-cognition inspired dataset? We introduce WROP (World Reasoning with Object Permanence), a data infrastructure of 150 hand-designed cognitive science inspired tasks, divided into six cognitive categories. We build Blender generators that randomize speed, lighting, camera angle, and other nuisance parameters while preserving each task's cognitive structure, yielding 10,000+ samples per task. We release a 1.5M-sample training corpus and a 300-question exam. On this exam we evaluate 14 video models: 3 reference-to-video, 7 edit, and 4 continuation, among which PWM-WROP, our 16B world model. In a blind pairwise Elo study, PWM-WROP ranks first among continuation models and third overall, behind only a statistical tie between two reference-to-video models. We release the data, exam, model answers, scores, weights, and PWM, our native-PyTorch training stack on AWS Trainium2.

Beyond Surface Style: Aligning Multi-Turn User Simulators with Behavioral Consistency cs.AI

Faithful user simulation is fundamental to building, evaluating, and improving interactive AI at scale. However, plausible individual responses do not ensure that simulated users reproduce the intent evolution and outcomes observed in real interactions. We propose TRACER, a multi-turn user simulator that explicitly models users' evolving intent and learns to align simulated behavior with real interaction trajectories. TRACER is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning on real user dialogues, followed by multi-turn reinforcement learning. The RL stage combines hierarchical outcome- and trajectory-level rewards with deviation-aware advantage modulation, jointly mitigating reward sparsity and credit assignment in long dialogues. On real customer-service sessions organized into reference cohorts, TRACER-7B surpasses the strongest baseline by 11.4 conversion F1, while also achieving the lowest group-level conversion-rate error and semantic trajectory distance, and generalizing to out-of-distribution scenarios. Human Turing tests yield identification accuracy close to chance, supporting the perceived naturalness of generated conversations. Building on this simulator, we further introduce the Dynamic Marketing Benchmark, which jointly evaluates persuasion effectiveness and response quality of LLMs through simulated interactions, revealing that higher response quality does not necessarily correspond to higher conversion rates.

Driving Epidemic Models with AI Agents: the Epydemix Agent Framework cs.AI

Artificial Intelligence agents based on large language models provide convenient natural language interfaces to scientific software, but reliability is not automatic. Here we introduce the Epydemix Agent Framework, an additive layer over Epydemix, an open-source Python library for stochastic compartmental epidemic modeling. The framework extends the library with four capabilities to facilitate interaction with an AI agent: discovery of available models and parameters, preventive validation of a declarative scenario specification, execution through tested library code, and inspectability of results. These capabilities let an agent handle the entire modeling process, from the natural-language description of the scenario to quantitative results, figures, and interpretation of findings without writing custom code. Each step reads input files and saves results in a separate output bundle, making the process auditable and reproducible. First, we show the end-to-end workflow with a case study comparing vaccination strategies for a novel respiratory virus. Second, we assessed the framework across 50 agent sessions and five modeling tasks by comparing the agent use of the framework against the direct use of the Python interface. The framework reduced turns, output tokens, and cost on most tasks, unless it trades resources for per-point reproducibility.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview57.284$4.50
2GPT-5.3 Codex5459$4.81
3Claude Opus 4.65353$10.00
4Claude Sonnet 4.651.756$6.00
5GPT-5.251.361$4.81
SWE-rebench

Agentic coding on real-world software engineering tasks

#ModelScore
1Claude Code52.9%
2Claude Opus 4.651.7%
3gpt-5.2-2025-12-11-xhigh51.7%
4gpt-5.2-2025-12-11-medium51.0%
5gpt-5.1-codex-max48.5%
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