The Inference Report

November 9, 2026

Anthropic just locked in $3.4 billion of gas-fired power to run its data centers, a move that signals how thoroughly the AI supply chain has verticalized, while simultaneously European activists are mounting real resistance to Google's expansion and newly elected politicians are signaling tighter restrictions on US data center construction. The infrastructure plays are getting more aggressive and more exposed, yet the capital and political economy of scaling has become as contested as the models themselves.

NVIDIA's execution in Korea illustrates the deeper pattern. Rather than simply selling chips, the company is positioning itself as the architect of Korea's entire sovereign AI infrastructure, from semiconductors and data centers to models and deployment frameworks. By investing in startups, releasing optimized model recipes, and wrapping Korean chip designers into collaborative frameworks around NVLink Fusion, NVIDIA has made it economically rational for Korean builders to stay within its ecosystem rather than develop alternatives. Korea gets to claim sovereignty while NVIDIA controls the connectivity tissue that makes everything work together. This represents a shift past being the best hardware vendor toward being the only rational choice for countries that want indigenous AI capacity without actually building independently.

Meanwhile, the technical work continues on separate tracks. Research today clusters around agentic systems that decompose complex tasks through modular orchestration, quantization techniques that compress reasoning without proportional accuracy loss, and structured representation learning that grounds predictions in domain-specific constraints. Across these patterns, the convergence is toward modular, inspectable pipelines where intermediate outputs remain verifiable and where efficiency and correctness are engineered rather than emergent. GitHub activity reflects this split between infrastructure for training at scale and practical tooling for deploying agents in production. Developers are shifting away from orchestrating everything through API calls toward self-hosted inference pipelines and realistic testing before deployment, suggesting they want control over their model infrastructure rather than dependency on external services.

The benchmarks tell a quieter story. SWE-rebench and Artificial Analysis show no meaningful movement from the previous cycle, with confidence intervals wide enough that many adjacent rankings overlap within their uncertainty bounds. Without published methodology and uncertainty quantification, it remains unclear whether this reflects genuine performance plateaus or simply evaluation opacity. What's clear is that the tension between scaling ambitions and political constraint is sharpening faster than the technical progress is accelerating.

Grant Calloway

AI LabsAll labs
From the WireAll feeds
Research PapersAll papers
On Agentic Manipulation Policies cs.RO

Recent work on robot manipulation has focused on specialist policies trained on demonstrations. We show that generalist AI models can control manipulators more reliably than specialist policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs). We systematically analyze agentic manipulation policies (AMPs), in which a generalist AI model commands the manipulator directly, adapting its actions as the task unfolds. We present AMP1, a reference harness that runs unchanged across single-arm, bimanual, and mobile manipulation. AMP1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoboLab-120 and CaP-Gym benchmarks, with no demonstrations or task-specific training. On RoboLab-120, AMP1 reaches an 85.6\% success rate zero-shot, compared to 49.2\% and 42.9\% for leading VLA and WAM policies. The agent succeeds zero-shot in 104 of 108 real-world trials spanning twelve tasks and three robot instances, reducing failure rates by 20x and 15x relative to strong VLA and WAM baselines. The basic harness supplies no grasping, pushing, or placing skills; the agent develops its own strategies, such as searching for hidden objects, using objects as tools, and calibrating its cameras. With the addition of a persistent memory store, the agent can also learn from experience: an augmented harness with a memory representation that is carried across episodes lowers the failure rate on RoboDojo bimanual manipulation tasks by 4.6x relative to zero-shot deployment. Our analysis suggests that AMPs are substantially more general and robust than specialist manipulation policies, providing a promising foundation for robot manipulation.

CPU-ARC: Agentic Reasoning Caching for on-CPU Reasoning Reuse cs.AI

Large language models reinvent the wheel all the time. They conflate task-solving with the execution of the solutions, which forces them to solve every problem from scratch. We show that once a task has been reasoned through, the application of its solution to a new problem instance can be done very efficiently and with little involvement from language models. We introduce agentic reasoning caching, a method for constructing robust CPU-executable agentic reasoning caches (ARCs) from LLM reasoning traces. ARCs show on-par performance with frontier LLMs across a range of difficult mathematical and scientific tasks, are fully explainable, continually trainable, robust to input perturbations, and 16-291x cheaper to invoke than the source model.

On the (non-)closedness of the set of ReLU networks cs.LG

We prove that the set $\mathcal{N}_N$ of ReLU networks with one hidden layer and at most $N\in\mathbb N$ neurons is weakly closed in $W^{1,p}(Ω)$, for a bounded connected open set $Ω\subset\mathbb R^d$. Consequently, every coercive, weakly lower semicontinuous energy on this space attains its minimum over $\mathcal{N}_N$. This covers the Deep Ritz method with convex integrands, Sobolev training and Lipschitz learning. Moreover, as the weight decay parameter tends to zero, minimizers of the regularized problem converge, up to subsequences, to minimizers with minimal parameter norm. We also prove that the set of ReLU networks with two hidden layers of bounded widths is not closed in $W^{1,p}(Ω)$ or in $C(\overlineΩ)$. This disproves a conjecture of Petersen, Raslan and Voigtlaender.

FlowMoP: Stochastic Multi-Person Motion Prediction cs.CV

Predicting the future motion of multiple people is inherently stochastic: the same observed history admits many plausible continuations depending on intent, coordination, and social context. Yet the dominant paradigm in multi-person 3D motion prediction remains deterministic, with existing methods producing a fixed number of outputs per agent. In contrast, we present a conditional flow matching framework that jointly generates diverse future motions for multiple agents, modeling both global trajectories and root-relative poses. A B-spline reparameterization compresses the generative state space while enforcing temporal smoothness, and a dual-stream transformer conditions each agent's predictions on observed neighbor motion for interaction-aware forecasting. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CMU-Mocap (UMPM) and 3DPW, outperforming deterministic baselines on joint position error, pose error, and final displacement error despite producing a full predictive distribution. We additionally establish the first motion prediction baseline on WorldPose, a large-scale professional soccer dataset, where social conditioning demonstrably concentrates predictive uncertainty along interaction-constrained directions.

Graded convolutional networks: scale invariance without the scale and robustness to unknown blur cs.CV

The Gaussian jet of an image is a graded vector space: a dilation by $λ$ multiplies derivatives of order $k$ by $λ^{-k}$. Local graded convolutions are exactly homogeneous differential operators, and a local feature is dilation-invariant if and only if it factors through the scale-normalized jet or, without the scale, through the retraction onto the weighted sphere of the grading. Under unknown Gaussian blur the retraction changes only by a change of scale, whereas the scale-normalized jet acquires a grading factor that no radial normalization removes. At the zero jet the retraction separates image families that radial normalizations and continuous classifiers cannot. Networks built on the retraction are universal for invariant features. On MNIST such a network keeps 88.4% accuracy under a two-pixel blur, against 66.2% for the same network on scale-normalized derivatives; in Lindeberg's Gaussian derivative network the retraction raises accuracy at that blur from 91.5% to 95.1%.

On the Reliability of Majority-Vote Pseudo-Labels in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning cs.AI

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) adapts pretrained language models to unlabeled target-domain data using self-generated pseudo-labels, whose reliability remains poorly understood. We analyze majority-vote supervision for TTRL with online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and decompose its error into population-majority bias and prompt-dependent finite-rollout variation. Because population-majority bias is generally unidentifiable without external supervision, we focus on mitigating the downstream effects of finite-rollout variation. We propose \emph{Prompt-Conditional Distributionally Robust DPO (PC-Dr.DPO)}, which conditions within-prompt robust reweighting on observed vote reliability to make updates from sampling-sensitive prompts more conservative. We further introduce a cache-based mechanism to reduce self-supervised forgetting during online adaptation. Across six mathematical and knowledge-intensive reasoning benchmarks and five model backbones, PC-Dr.DPO matches or outperforms the strongest TTRL baseline in 24 of 30 settings.

BenchmarksFull tables
Artificial AnalysisIntelligence Index

Composite score across coding, math, and reasoning

#ModelScoretok/s$/1M
1Gemini 4 Carbon60102$8.00
2Claude Opus 5.559.195$8.00
3GPT-6 Astra56.953$20.00
4GPT-6.1 Sol54.683$4.00
5Claude Sonnet 5.554.5136$4.00
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%