The Inference Report

October 16, 2026

What happens when the companies betting the most on AI suddenly have to prove they're safe enough to stay in business? The answer is arriving faster than anyone expected. Regulators are demanding safety records from OpenAI and Anthropic with the same urgency they apply to data breaches, while state attorneys general are suing over ChatGPT's effects on children. Simultaneously, investors are abandoning the debt of AI infrastructure companies, sending CoreWeave bonds into stressed territory and forcing Australian data center operators to shelve IPO plans. Anthropic, valued at $1.5 trillion in private discussions down from $2 trillion, handed independent researchers direct access to its systems and surrendered the right to block their published risk assessments. This is not a company confident in its trajectory. It is one preparing for a world where opacity becomes more expensive than admission.

The infrastructure meant to deliver AI abundance is cracking under the weight of its own costs. Google now imposes daily token quotas on BigQuery because enterprises cannot predict their bills. Microsoft shifted Copilot from fixed pricing to consumption-based models, a change Gartner reports is among the most common questions it receives from clients. Amazon sells new AI devices starting at $74.99 that summarize conversations and create to-do lists, a sharp distance from the ambient intelligence vision. Meta released an 816-billion-parameter model that runs locally on Mac hardware rather than generating recurring service revenue. The actual cost structure of AI is becoming visible, and it bears no resemblance to the venture capital thesis that funded this sector.

Accountability is the missing word in every headline but the underlying fact in all of them. When an AI agent makes a decision, who bears the cost if it fails? When a model is compromised, who notifies users? ServiceNow rebranded its AI Control Tower to Super Intelligence Control Tower and added verifiable identities for agents, but existing law does not recognize liability chains created by systems acting without human oversight. Researchers are calling for air-gapped training systems. Security vendors report that TypeSafe's Jev model is more vulnerable to adversarial attacks than traditional large language models. The builders are moving faster than the accountability infrastructure can handle, and the market is pricing that gap.

In the labs and on GitHub, the competitive focus has shifted from building the largest models to owning the layers above them. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Microsoft are embedding their models into domain-specific workflows where switching costs matter. NVIDIA consolidated automotive partnerships with Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, not through technical breakthroughs but through multi-year infrastructure commitments. Open-source models are fracturing the middle tier, with Mistral and Hugging Face distributing models across multiple scales. On GitHub, the trending projects cluster around a single obsession: reducing token waste. Caveman cuts token usage by 65 percent through simplified agent communication. Xerj and context-mode slash retrieval overhead by 40x and 98 percent respectively. When developers stop tolerating verbose abstractions and start measuring infrastructure costs in tokens, the era of feature-rich abstractions ends. The builders have finally met the constraints.

Grant Calloway

AI LabsAll labs
From the WireAll feeds
Research PapersAll papers
LIBERO-PeRM: Benchmarking Personalized Robotic Manipulation cs.RO

Personalization is essential for general-purpose robots to transition into household environments and achieve true practicality. While general robotic manipulation has been extensively studied, personalized robotic manipulation (PeRM) lacks a controlled benchmark for separating task completion from preference satisfaction. We introduce LIBERO-PeRM, a benchmark for preference learning in embodied agents. LIBERO-PeRM studies five questions: 1) how policies follow preferences in zero-shot settings; 2) how they learn single preferences from demonstrations; 3) how efficiently they acquire preferences as demonstrations increase; 4) how learned preferences generalize across layouts and tasks; and 5) how policies compose preferences and behave under conflicts. We propose a controlled formulation and taxonomy of observable preferences in simulation, covering motion, skill, and user-profile choices. This formulation is restricted to language-expressible preferences that can be instantiated in LIBERO without changing the task goal, evaluated automatically, and reused across tasks. Building on LIBERO, our procedural pipeline generates paired demonstrations with and without preferences. We create five task suites (312 tasks) with high-quality demonstrations, rich metadata, and preference-satisfaction metrics. Experiments show that current VLA policies struggle with zero-shot personalization, while SFT makes preferences learnable. Mixed training achieves better no-preference retention than sequential adaptation and improves performance with contextual prompts compared with preference-only training, but can weaken motion-preference learning; preference generalization, decomposition, and conflict handling remain difficult. The code, datasets, and demos can be found on the project website: https://libero-perm.github.io/.

Discovering state-of-the-art quantum circuits with large language models quant-ph

Significant efforts are currently being directed toward the implementation of large-scale quantum information processors, but realizing useful quantum advantage also requires the development of efficient quantum algorithms. While for many practical problems the dominant resource costs are associated with a small set of computational primitives, optimizing them in the quantum setting presents unique challenges, including a reversibility constraint absent from ordinary classical computation. Here we introduce an evolutionary framework in which large language models (LLMs) propose circuit designs and an independent evaluator verifies and scores them. We apply this framework to tasks spanning numerical computation, chemistry, optimization, quantum simulation, and number theory. In seven of the eight tasks, the discovered circuits significantly reduce both Toffoli and qubit counts relative to the state of the art. In the eighth, the search discovers a new reversible architecture for prime-field modular inversion. By handling reversibility differently, the architecture makes divsteps -- a classical algorithm previously impractical for reversible integer arithmetic -- viable and substantially improves the Toffoli-qubit trade-off for modular inversion. These results open the door for evaluator-guided LLM co-design of new algorithmic structures for quantum computation.

T2-z: Test-Time Optimization of Environment Latents for Robotic World Models cs.RO

Predicting how the world responds to an action requires more than what can be seen: robots must account for environmental factors that are neither directly observable nor explicitly specified, from physical properties such as friction and mass to human-defined environmental rules. We introduce T2-Z for test-time optimization of environment latents, which augments a robotic world model with a learnable environment latent to condition world predictions. This compact latent captures underlying environmental variation without supervision of what environmental factors exist or what values they take. During training, T2-Z alternates between two stages: a world-model optimization stage that fixes the latents and learns general action-conditioned dynamics across environments; and an environment-latent optimization stage that freezes the world model and optimizes the conditioning latents, allowing latent structure to emerge purely through world prediction. At test time, the world model remains frozen and a newly initialized environment latent is optimized from one or more test-time interactions, adapting the model to previously unseen environmental configurations. Across 7 simulated settings and 4 real-world robotic tasks, T2-Z reduces object prediction error metric from 15.20 to 7.00 and raises action success from 33.73% to 72.96%. Its emergent latents capture structured representations of individual and compounded factors across diverse visual scenes. Ablations further show that T2-Z can efficiently infer environment latents from as little as a single test-time interaction trajectory.

CoDA: Co-Evolution of Data Engines and Action Policies cs.RO

Generative simulation can automate robot environment construction, but physically valid environments are not necessarily useful for training. The challenge is to identify environments that address a policy's failures and supervision that helps it overcome them. We introduce CoDA, a framework in which a simulation data engine and an action policy co-evolve through a shared heterogeneous memory of environment construction, policy failures, and learning progress. The memory compiles validated diagnoses from a vision-language critic into generation programs that recreate difficulties and training programs that help the policy overcome them. We further propose Text2potential to convert these diagnoses into staged potentials for action-chunk value learning, providing dense supervision for policy updates while preserving the task's optimal policy under standard shaping assumptions. Measured learning progress guides further generation and program refinement. Across four manipulation task families, CoDA improves out-of-distribution success from 5.3% after supervised fine-tuning to 27.6%, exceeding the strongest closed-loop baseline by 9.5 percentage points with the same generation budget. On LIBERO-Pro, 15 rounds of generation and training raise success from 25% to 84% under position perturbations and from 1% to 76% under instruction perturbations.

PathFM: Fast Generative Forecasting of Multivariate Trajectories cs.LG

Time series foundation models are becoming increasingly popular for general-purpose forecasting. However, most leading models predict marginal quantiles, leaving the dependence structure of future trajectories unspecified. This distinction matters for trajectory-dependent quantities such as cumulative demand, peak load, and event timing, yet point and marginal scores do not reveal it. To model this dependence, we introduce PathFM, a trajectory-based forecasting model that uses flow matching to generate complete future paths. We further distill the model to one or two steps and share history attention cache across draws. Together, these enable PathFM to generate multiple paths for a single series in roughly the time needed for one query to a quantile model. The distilled sampler also makes it practical to optimize a calibration loss directly. PathFM achieves competitive marginal accuracy on the established forecasting benchmarks fev-bench and TIME. To complement these evaluations, we introduce Forecast Path Score Bench (fps-bench), which augments fev-bench tasks with energy and variogram scores and downstream metrics. PathFM achieves a higher aggregate path score on fps-bench than all evaluated external baselines. Experiments on chaotic systems further show that our flow model sustains long-run variability, while strong baselines rapidly collapse. PathFM makes generative time series forecasting both competitive and practical, enabling diverse downstream applications.

OmniVerifier-C1: Decomposed Graded Verifier for Rule-Governed Generative World Modeling cs.CL

Generative visual verifiers play a crucial role in advancing multimodal intelligence. To enhance the robustness of visual verifiers in complex multimodal scenarios involving compositional requirements, we move beyond conventional binary verifiers that produce only True/False discrete judgments and introduce a verifier that automatically decomposes complex prompts or environmental rules into fine-grained components and assigns pointwise scores to provide a continuous and more informative critique signal. Our experiments further demonstrate that these structured and interpretable outputs improve the verifier's generalization to out-of-domain multimodal critic tasks. To train this verifier, we introduce a Decoupled RL training strategy that jointly optimizes sub-question-level binary judgment and global alignment scoring, using precise local feedback to develop fine-grained verification capabilities that provide a foundation for reliable continuous scoring at the global level. Under a general reinforcement learning framework, we first empirically demonstrate that the proposed pointwise graded verifier significantly outperforms binary verifiers in traditional text-to-image scenarios. We then extend our investigation to rule-governed generative world modeling where generative models are leveraged for world simulation and world reasoning under explicit rules. From a theoretical standpoint, we further show that a pairwise verification paradigm yields more accurate critiques than the pointwise formulation when ground-truth images are available, with empirical results on diverse structured world-modeling tasks such as Maze and Sudoku further validating the effectiveness of our approach. Overall, our findings suggest a key insight: the transition from generative models to structured world-modeling agents critically hinges on the availability of accurate pairwise graded visual verifiers.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1Claude Opus 5.557.698$8.00
2Claude Sonnet 5.556142$4.00
3Muse Wonder Full55.80$0.00
4Claude Fable 5.153.466$20.00
5GPT-6 Astra52.749$20.00
SWE-rebench

Agentic coding on real-world software engineering tasks

#ModelScore
1AnthropicFable 5 [high]Model64.5%± 1.41%
2GrokGrok 4.5 [high]Model63.8%± 0.60%
3AnthropicOpus 5 [high]Model63.4%± 1.35%
4Z.aiGLM-5.2 [high]Model62.9%± 1.19%
5OpenAIGPT-5.6 Sol [medium]Model62.3%± 1.83%