The Inference Report

October 21, 2026

The compute bottleneck is reshaping the entire competitive order. Anthropic faces GPU starvation from cloud providers who now view it as a competitor rather than a customer, forcing a November IPO just to fund infrastructure spending. Google and Amazon are both releasing tools to move PyTorch workloads off Nvidia GPUs, signaling the chip maker's stranglehold is weakening. DeepSeek open-sourced DeepInfer to run on both Nvidia and Huawei processors, prompting the US government to ban the model from federal agencies within sixty days. That ban is a political gesture masking a harder truth: the US is regulating Chinese models out because competing fairly has become impossible. Meanwhile, the real power is consolidating vertically. Samsung is building a fourth fab for GPU memory. Eka Robotics hit 1.45 billion dollars valuation on physical AI for robotic arms. OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio for life sciences. Anthropic launched Claude Frontier Academy to train ten thousand engineers by end of 2027. These are not headline plays. They are market consolidation. Companies with compute, vertical applications, and trained labor will win. Companies that depend on renting access to shared infrastructure will not.

The competitive intensity has moved downstream from model weights to deployment efficiency and task-specific integration. OpenAI's ChatGPT Work achieved 94% reduction in reconciliation time and 88.6% alignment with senior investor decisions, displacing human labor in time-sensitive tasks. AWS Lambda now runs plain HTTP servers without adapters. IBM released llm-d 1.0 for distributed inference. AMD optimized for lower time-per-output-token. These infrastructure moves are designed to make AI services cheaper and faster to run, not flashy but foundational. GitHub's trending projects confirm the shift: Orca, Ponytail, OpenCode, and Agency-Agents solve the same problem of running and coordinating multiple coding agents at scale. Headroom compresses token usage by 60-95%. Graphify converts codebases into queryable knowledge graphs using deterministic parsing instead of vector stores. Developers are no longer asking whether agents work. They are asking how to make them cost less, run faster, and integrate into existing infrastructure without ripping everything out.

Meta's data practices expose the gap between PR and actual behavior. The company dropped the word "training" from its commercial terms after backlash but continues scraping under softer language while refusing to honor robots.txt, facing real legal jeopardy. Meta Muse hit 10 million US downloads in forty days with retention beating rivals, but immediately exposed a privacy flaw that leaked personal and business secrets when users shared conversations. The pattern is consistent: move fast, absorb the hit, iterate. What Meta risks losing is regulatory goodwill at a moment when it needs it most, as the industry fractures along lines of regulatory exposure and compute dependency.

Grant Calloway

AI LabsAll labs
From the WireAll feeds
Research PapersAll papers
Joints, Camera, Action! Co-Generating 3D Motion and Video for Arbitrary Rigs cs.CV

Video generation models can now depict remarkably realistic motion. Yet it is unclear how to use this motion beyond pixels: to animate a specific 3D asset and replay the animation in its 3D scene. For instance, a video model can show a monkey jumping over a crossbar, but it cannot return that jump as replayable 3D motion placed in the 3D scene. Here we present a model that directly co-generates the video and 3D motion for any supplied rig, along with a camera that registers this motion to the scene. Prior video-motion models either handle only human skeletons, often adding billions of parameters, or triangulate 3D motion from generated 2D pose maps. We instead keep 3D motion in a separate model that supports arbitrary skeletons, and connect it to a pretrained video model through a small set of cross-attention layers. This separation lets the motion model first learn how skeletons move from motion-only data, which is easier to obtain and augment than paired video. Additionally, our model learns to locate each joint in the video frames, which lets us recover the camera and place the 3D motion in the scene. To train across many skeletons, we use a generative video editor to place animated 3D assets in scenes suited to their actions, curating the edits so their known motion remains valid. Together with human and robot video, this yields nearly 200K training pairs. Our evaluations demonstrate that our model animates diverse rigs from text more faithfully than video-first pipelines, and its motion responds to the surrounding scene. It also turns video into rig motion, rig motion into video, and enables keyframe-based control of the 3D motion. Videos and additional results are available on our project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/projects/jca/.

GBClaw: An agentic AI framework for atomistic grain boundary research and mechanistic discovery cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems hold immense potential for automating complex workflows in materials discovery and design, but extending them to domain-intensive mechanistic investigations remains challenging. Here, we present GBClaw, an agentic AI framework for investigating the structure and deformation of general grain boundaries (GBs). Although general GBs constitute the vast majority of real-world interfaces in polycrystalline materials, they remain understudied because their structural complexity and interfacial mismatch complicate experimental and modeling research. GBClaw integrates large language models (LLMs) into a modular architecture comprising an orchestrator, specialized agents, domain-specific tools, simulation interfaces, and hierarchical memory. Through dynamic replanning and iterative workflow refinement, the framework effectively connects systematic simulations with targeted mechanistic analysis. Applied to 14 general asymmetric tilt GBs in nickel, GBClaw characterized interfacial defect structures and identified diverse deformation modes across these incommensurate boundaries. Comparing boundary sliding with and without secondary GB misfit dislocations revealed substantial differences in shear strength, underscoring the critical role of defect hierarchies in sliding resistance. Furthermore, researcher-guided follow-up calculations traced an anomalously high shear resistance to metastable boundary structures. This work demonstrates that combining agentic AI with domain expertise bridges high-throughput computational screening with deep physical understanding of complex material interfaces.

Learning Adaptable Dexterous Skills via Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking cs.RO

Dexterous multi-finger hands hold promise to unlock diverse skills like functional grasps, in-hand reorientation, and dynamic handover that the human-designed world assumes, yet existing learning recipes force a trade-off. Goal-reaching reinforcement learning generalizes to arbitrary object poses but, lacking any human prior, converges to unnatural and unreliable finger strategies; motion tracking reproduces human-like behavior from a single clip but cannot deviate from it. We present AdaDex, a goal-conditioned RL framework that turns a single hand-object trajectory of a few seconds---from mocap data or HOI reconstruction from in-the-wild RGB(D) video---into an adaptable dexterous skill. At the core of AdaDex is Hybrid Dexterous Mimicking: a shared policy is trained on two populations of massively parallel environments: motion tracking environments trained with dense motion tracking objective, which instill the human prior from human motion; and generalization environments with noised initial states and goals and a sparse object-success reward, which force the skill to work far off the reference. From seconds of human motion per skill, the resulting policies can learn diverse adaptable dexterous skills, such as functional grasping, object reposing, in-hand reorientation with finger gaiting, and dynamic behaviors like throw-and-catch. Our method outperforms baselines in terms of generalization and functionality, and we demonstrate transfer across simulators and to the real world. Project page: https://yuxuank.com/AdaDex/.

UniWALM: Unified World Action Language Model for Embodied Robot Control cs.RO

Motivated by the human ability to integrate experience across language, perception, and action, we introduce UniWALM, a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action, and language in a single shared representation, where each modality is both a conditioning signal and a supervision target. We ask: can jointly generating language enrich this shared representation, improving manipulation and supporting memory-dependent behavior? Unlike prior approaches that attach a reasoning or vision-language model to a video-action backbone and run them as distinct stages, UniWALM unifies all three modalities inside a single mixture-of-transformers backbone whose per-modality diffusion heads co-denoise synchronously, decoding subtask and textual memory in the same pass as action with no separate planning stage; the generated language is re-consumed on the next step, closing a language-as-memory loop without an external planner or memory bank. To keep the action stream reliable under this richer objective, we further introduce Flow Matching with Correction (FMC), a training objective that teaches recovery from perturbed action trajectories at no inference-time cost. UniWALM consistently improves over same-backbone baselines (e.g., FastWAM) on compositional pick-and-place (MolmoSpaces) and across the memory-dependent subset of RMBench, where it reaches 34.5% without any pretrained language or reasoning model and exceeds Mem-0's keyframe-equipped setup (28.5%) using only a single anchor frame. On a real-world Find-the-Item task, generating textual memory lifts success from 11.1% to 61.1%, while state-of-the-art VLAs stay at or below chance (<=33.3%).

Industrial ReMEmbR: Scaling Spatiotemporal Memory to Robot Fleets cs.RO

Warehouse robot fleets continuously observe operational conditions, but preserving these observations as reusable semantic memory incurs substantial computation, communication, and storage costs. For example, explaining recurring aisle blockages can require reviewing video from multiple robots across several shifts. We present IndustrialRemembr, a shared spatiotemporal memory system that extends NVIDIA ReMEmbR to robot fleets and reduces server-side computation by generating scene descriptions only on demand. On each robot, an NVIDIA Jetson encodes video clips into retrieval embeddings with Cosmos-Embed1, vision tokens with Cosmos3-Edge, and reconstruction latents with the Wan2.2 VAE, without uploading raw camera frames. The encoding models are re-used to detect people in image patches, zeroing them out to support PII abstraction for GDPR-compliant deployments. We split Cosmos3-Edge at its vision-language boundary, placing the vision encoder on the robot and the language decoder on an on-premises server. A Nemotron agent retrieves memories by content, position, and time and queries the decoder using cached vision tokens. This design eliminates caption generation at write time, while cached-token decoding reproduces the unsplit model's output in all 450 tested decodes.

Planning under Noise with Neural Operators cs.LG

Planning under uncertain control execution noise requires reliable feedback policies across diverse environments. We introduce Planning Under Noise (PUN), a neural operator that learns noise-aware value fields for planning in unseen geometries. Building on an established screened-Poisson formulation of stochastic optimal control, we address two challenges: specifying boundary conditions that support navigation across varying geometries and efficiently computing fields with reliable gradients. Zero-Dirichlet obstacle boundaries terminate sampled paths at walls, weakening the goal signal along long routes and making it harder to estimate reliably. We instead impose reflecting Neumann conditions on obstacles and a Dirichlet condition at the goal, allowing sampled paths to continue exploring free space until they reach the target. To solve the resulting PDE without a configuration-space mesh, we extend a Monte Carlo (MC) solver, Walk on Stars (WoSt), to higher dimensions. However, local MC fluctuations can reverse estimated gradient directions and cause planning failures, making direct planning require costly sampling. PUN amortizes this computation by learning geometry-to-field mappings from noisy, partially converged Monte Carlo labels, avoiding expensive convergence for every training example. At inference, test-time scaling uses bounded local search guided by the predicted global field. We evaluate PUN on planning tasks across dimensions. Across four noise levels, PUN matches or outperforms all compared planners, achieving 95-100% success on the 4D replanning benchmark while maintaining the lowest runtime. At the highest tested noise level in 4D, PUN achieves 10.7-60.6% relative gains in success rate over other methods while running 3.29-32.15 times faster.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1Claude Opus 5.557.696$8.00
2Claude Sonnet 5.556140$4.00
3Muse Wonder Full55.80$0.00
4Claude Fable 5.153.472$20.00
5GPT-6 Astra52.766$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%
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