The Inference Report

April 24, 2026

The infrastructure arms race is now consuming the balance sheets of the companies that claim to be building it. Meta is cutting 10 percent of its workforce to offset $135 billion in data center spending this year, while Microsoft commits $140 billion to AI investment and OpenAI, xAI, and peers plan data centers emitting 129 million tons of greenhouse gases annually. This is not growth capital deployed strategically into products with revenue models. This is survival spending, the cost of staying in a game where the entry fee keeps rising and the winner remains unclear. The spending is also accelerating consolidation: smaller builders are being acquired by larger ones, and the companies spending the most on infrastructure are the ones that can afford to cut payroll and still outspend everyone else. Capital concentration and margin compression are creating a two or three player market in foundational models, with everyone else building on top or fighting for scraps in narrower verticals.

The actual products being built on top of this infrastructure reveal why the spending feels mandatory. Everyone is launching agents simultaneously because the competitive window feels like it's closing. OpenAI released GPT-5.5 and workspace agents in ChatGPT. Microsoft added hosted agents to Foundry Agent Service. Google launched both an updated Gemini Enterprise app and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform on the same day. Anthropic's Mythos Preview has spooked financial institutions enough that UK banks are seeking access. Yet the speed of deployment is outpacing governance. An enterprise deploying a LangChain-based research agent during preproduction review still faces the problem that autonomous agents are not stable software artifacts, yet authorization frameworks treat them as if they were. Developers are adopting tools that could replace them while simultaneously worrying about displacement. The productivity gains are real and measurable. The anxiety is proportional.

OpenAI is consolidating its position as the primary vendor of production AI agents by shipping GPT-5.5 directly into Codex, its application layer for knowledge work automation, while simultaneously ensuring that layer runs on NVIDIA's infrastructure. Rather than compete on model weights alone, OpenAI is bundling model capability with workflow orchestration, automations, plugins, skills, and structured task execution, which creates friction for customers to migrate. NVIDIA's public embrace of Codex running on GB200 systems signals that the infrastructure vendor sees agent frameworks as the real margin driver. Meanwhile, Hugging Face's focus on browser-based transformer inference via Chrome extensions points toward a different vector: moving model execution to the edge and away from centralized inference, which could fragment the cloud-based agent stack that OpenAI and NVIDIA are building. The announcements collectively reveal a market sorting into layers, with model vendors securing inference infrastructure partnerships, application vendors building stickiness through workflow automation, and infrastructure players ensuring they own the hardware dependency. Competition is happening at integration points, not at the model level alone.

On GitHub, the trending list reveals a decisive split between two categories of developer effort: infrastructure for AI agents and tools that make those agents actually useful at scale. The agent-building layer is consolidating around concrete implementations rather than framework abstractions. Cline and similar autonomous coding agents now come with context-window optimization built in, which solves a real constraint: LLM context is expensive and agents generate noise. Skill libraries like VoltAgent's collection of 1000+ agent skills acknowledge that agents need domain knowledge packaged as callable tools. The discovery layer shows where harder problems still live. Data annotation and curation remain foundational, while LocalAI's positioning as a hardware-agnostic inference engine reflects a practical reality that developers want to run models locally without GPU dependencies to cut costs and latency. Smaller repos like abliterix and fim-ai/fim-one point to where the research frontier is: not whether agents can work, but how to make them predictable, steerable, and efficient. What's conspicuously absent from the trending list is another wave of general-purpose frameworks. The market has decided those are solved problems.

Grant Calloway

AI LabsAll labs
From the WireAll feeds
Research Papers — FocusedAll papers
Robust Low-Tubal-Rank Tensor Completion under Cross-Concentrated Sampling stat.ML

Tensor cross-concentrated sampling (t-CCS) bridges entrywise sampling and t-CUR slice-wise sampling by observing entries only within selected horizontal and lateral slices. Existing t-CCS completion methods, however, assume that the observations are free of gross corruption. In this work, we study robust recovery of a third-order low-tubal-rank tensor from partial t-CCS observations contaminated by sparse, arbitrarily large outliers. We propose Robust Iterative t-CUR (R-ItCUR), a tensor-native algorithm that partitions the sampled tensor cross into two exterior blocks and an intersection block, applies adaptive blockwise Welsch correction for outlier suppression, and updates the low-rank component through projected blockwise gradient descent. By operating directly on the sampled cross, R-ItCUR avoids reconstructing the full tensor throughout the iterations, resulting in substantial memory and computational savings. Experiments on synthetic tensors, cardiac MRI data, and three-dimensional seismic data demonstrate accurate recovery and strong robustness to sparse gross corruptions. The results further highlight the importance of explicitly exploiting the cross-concentrated sampling structure in robust tensor completion.

Automatic Statistical Test for Rationally Expressible Algorithms by Selective Inference, with Applications to Feature Selection stat.ML

Selective inference (SI) provides statistically valid $p$-values for hypotheses selected by applying an algorithm to the data, correcting for the bias that arises when the same data are used both to select and to test a hypothesis. Developing an SI procedure for a new algorithm, however, has required an expert to derive, and then implement, the selection event, i.e., the conditions under which the hypothesis is selected. Repeating this specialized effort for every new algorithm is why exact SI has so far been available for only a narrow class. We propose AutoSI, a framework that removes this barrier in two ways. First, AutoSI constructs the selection event automatically from the algorithm's individual operations, so the user only writes the algorithm as ordinary NumPy-like code and derives nothing by hand. Second, AutoSI broadens the class of selection events SI can handle: existing exact methods are limited to selection events characterized by linear or quadratic inequalities in the data, whereas AutoSI covers any algorithm expressible through rational functions of the data (ratios of polynomials). We prove that the $p$-values computed by AutoSI are exactly valid in finite samples. We demonstrate AutoSI on three feature-selection methods, each written in a few dozen lines of code. One of these methods, the lasso with its tuning parameter selected by cross-validated $R^2$, cannot be handled within existing exact SI frameworks and is made possible by AutoSI. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that the resulting $p$-values control the type I error rate (i.e., the false positive rate) at the nominal level while retaining high power.

Intrinsic-Hybrid Latent Diffusion Models for Generative Modeling on Unknown Manifolds stat.ML

We introduce the Intrinsic Hybrid Latent Diffusion Model (ILDM), a generative framework that integrates probabilistic dimensionality reduction with geometry-aware diffusion on unknown manifolds. While diffusion models (DMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in high-dimensional data synthesis, they rely on large training datasets and ignore intrinsic geometric structure. Latent diffusion models (LDMs) address the high dimensionality by learning a latent space, but they typically impose a Euclidean structure, failing to capture the underlying manifold geometry, especially problematic in data-sparse regimes. ILDM addresses these limitations by interpreting the latent space as a chart of an unknown Riemannian manifold, with geometry and uncertainty quantified through a probabilistic decoder. The forward process is a hybrid diffusion that switches between Riemannian and Euclidean dynamics based on local uncertainty, where the Riemannian component is governed by a probabilistic metric tensor derived from the decoder. To learn the generative dynamics, we introduce an approximate denoising score matching method tailored to the hybrid diffusion setting, enabling a backward process defined by hybrid Langevin dynamics. Experiments on COIL-100, MNIST, and cardiac MRI datasets demonstrate that ILDM significantly improves generation quality, achieving lower FID and LPIPS scores compared to standard diffusion and latent diffusion models.

Stable Density Ridges: Consistency and Convergence of Subspace Constrained Mean Shift stat.ML

The Subspace Constrained Mean Shift (SCMS) algorithm is a popular nonparametric method for extracting density ridges, which serve as a low-dimensional representation of high-dimensional data. It is a widely held belief in the literature that SCMS trajectories converge to the classical density ridge, which we call the "static ridge", defined via the density gradient and the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the density's Hessian. In this paper, we demonstrate that this assumption does not hold in general, as the static definition fails to account for the rotation of the trailing eigenspace along the continuous flow of the algorithm's underlying vector field. To resolve this, we propose a paradigm shift by introducing the "stable ridge", a novel geometric structure defined through the lens of dynamical systems and the Jacobian of the projected density gradient. We prove that this stable ridge is the true theoretical target of the SCMS algorithm. Building upon this foundation, we develop a generalized SCMS framework utilizing a constant step size, establishing its uniform R-linear convergence and topological surjectivity onto the stable ridge. We further derive the rates of convergence for estimating the stable ridge in terms of the Hausdorff distance. Finally, we expose that the original SCMS algorithm suffers from polynomial-time computational complexity, which is caused by implicitly coupling the step size to the smoothing bandwidth via the Mean Shift operator, and demonstrate how our generalized framework provides a statistically consistent and more efficient solution.

A Hyperfinite Framework for Score-Based Generative Modeling stat.ML

Score-based diffusion models are typically formulated using continuous-time stochastic differential equations and measure-theoretic stochastic calculus. In this paper, we develop a hyperfinite formulation of score-based generative modeling within the framework of Nonstandard Analysis. Starting from an internal diffusion process on a hyperfinite grid, we derive the associated infinitesimal generator and establish its correspondence with the classical Fokker--Planck equation. We then obtain a hyperfinite backward-mean identity that yields the reverse-time drift and provides a constructive derivation of the reverse-time SDE. Building on these results, we show that minimization of an internal score-matching objective recovers the score function required by the reverse-time dynamics, thereby connecting score estimation with generative sampling directly at the hyperfinite level. Under suitable assumptions, we further derive a hyperfinite Girsanov formula and establish a relationship between likelihood optimization and Fisher-divergence objectives. Finally, we analyze the second-order consistency of the hyperfinite dynamics and show that the leading correction term depends explicitly on the fourth moment of the increment distribution, with the Gaussian value $κ=3$ eliminating the leading dispersion contribution. Taken together, these results provide a unified hyperfinite framework for diffusion-based generative modeling--while laying foundations for further extensions--that links discrete grid dynamics, reverse-time diffusion, score matching, and likelihood-based formulations within a common nonstandard setting.

Particle-based Generalised Stochastic Optimisation stat.ML

We develop a class of diffusion-based stochastic particle optimisation methods for loss functions with intractable gradients. Specifically, we consider problems in which the loss gradient is an integral with respect to a parameter-dependent distribution, a structure that includes training generative models, fine-tuning, and learning latent-variable models. We introduce mean-field dynamics and its interacting-particle approximations, which contain several existing algorithms as special cases and provides a route to constructing new methods. Under well-posedness and joint contractivity assumptions, we prove exponential convergence and show that the continuous-time particle system admits a non-asymptotic error bound. We illustrate it by developing momentum and higher-order Langevin variants and evaluating them on maximum marginal-likelihood estimation and energy-based-model training.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1GPT-5.560.20$11.25
2Claude Opus 4.757.358$10.00
3Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview57.2132$4.50
4GPT-5.456.880$5.63
5Kimi K2.653.9123$1.71
SWE-rebench

Agentic coding on real-world software engineering tasks

#ModelScore
1Claude Opus 4.665.3%
2gpt-5.2-2025-12-11-medium64.4%
3GLM-562.8%
4gpt-5.4-2026-03-05-medium62.8%
5GLM-5.162.7%