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What is AI research betting on?

AI research is moving most toward agentic systems and tool use (+0.9 pts of new papers). Robotics and embodied control and evaluation and benchmarking follow.

Measured by Vela Breakout, as of Oct 10, 2026.

The top 10

  1. 1Agentic systems and tool use4.7% → 5.6% of papers+0.9 pts
  2. 2Robotics and embodied control3.1% → 3.9% of papers+0.8 pts
  3. 3Evaluation and benchmarking9.7% → 10.4% of papers+0.7 pts
  4. 4Efficient inference and compression5.2% → 5.8% of papers+0.6 pts
  5. 5Recommender systems1.4% → 1.9% of papers+0.5 pts
  6. 6Knowledge distillation0.8% → 1.0% of papers+0.3 pts
  7. 7Speech and audio processing1.3% → 1.5% of papers+0.2 pts
  8. 8Vision-language grounding and navigation0.7% → 0.9% of papers+0.2 pts
  9. 9Agent benchmark1.4% → 1.6% of papers+0.2 pts
  10. 10Retrieval augmented generation and search2.7% → 2.9% of papers+0.2 pts

Ideas ranked by the gain in their share of new AI papers, this quarter against the one before. How we measure

See the full ranking and chart

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