Research ideas · story

AI research is changing what it works on.

Evaluation and benchmarking, robotics and embodied control and agentic systems and tool use gained the most share of AI papers in three months.

Gaining share of papers

1.0%10.0%Jan 22Jul 23Jan 25Sep 26similar peersEvaluation andbenchmarking11.3%Robotics andembodied control5.1%Agentic systems andtool use5.0%

Share of all AI papers, last 3 months against the 3 before. Share, not counts.

Reinforcement learning lost the most: -0.7 pts

1.0%10.0%Aug 19Dec 21Apr 24Sep 26similar peersReinforcementlearning3.8%LLM alignment andpost-training1.9%LLM reasoning andprompting1.7%
Measured, not estimated · snapshot 2026-10-02 · Growth is shown only where the starting size is big enough to mean something.