GoKawiilAI industry shifts focus from training to inference workloads in 2026
Major AI labs have moved their attention from building ever-larger models to running inference—the process of using trained models to generate text, code, and images. This shift is driven by growing real-world use of large language models, the rise of reasoning models that repeatedly reprompt themselves, and autonomous AI agents that run continuously rather than just responding to single queries. Amazon Web Services, for instance, has split inference tasks between its Trainium chips and Cerebras's wafer-scale hardware.