Four skills worth adding to your workflow today if you don't want to be left behind

The post 4 Claude Skills Every Data Scientist Needs in 2026 appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Navigation enables a robot to turn perception and motion into purposeful autonomy. Unlike locomotion, which produces stable movement, navigation must be used to...

Navigation enables a robot to turn perception and motion into purposeful autonomy. Unlike locomotion, which produces stable movement, navigation must be used to continuously localize the robot, interpret changing surroundings, select a route, and avoid obstacles to reach a goal safely. Moving this capability to a new robot or scene can require new data, simulation assets, robot interfaces…

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Why most agents are just flowcharts in disguise, and what to build instead.

The post Is Agentic AI Just Automation? appeared first on Towards Data Science.

The massive growth of generative AI has fundamentally altered data center design. As distributed model training scales to span hundreds of thousands of GPUs,...

The massive growth of generative AI has fundamentally altered data center design. As distributed model training scales to span hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the scale-out network connecting these nodes has emerged as a first-order performance bottleneck. For decades, traditional off-the-shelf Ethernet has been the undisputed king of enterprise and cloud networking. It is cheap, standardized…

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AI agents have expanded inference from single-turn interactions into multi-step workflows that reason, invoke tools, coordinate subagents, and carry growing...

AI agents have expanded inference from single-turn interactions into multi-step workflows that reason, invoke tools, coordinate subagents, and carry growing context from one turn to the next. The scale of this shift is now visible in raw consumption: across 100 trillion tokens of real-world usage, OpenRouter’s State of AI report found that average prompt tokens per request grew roughly fourfold…

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AI factories are interconnected systems where fleet economics depend on how efficiently the entire stack converts power and capital into completed agent tasks....

AI factories are interconnected systems where fleet economics depend on how efficiently the entire stack converts power and capital into completed agent tasks. While GPUs run the models, CPUs handle orchestration, tool execution, and sandboxed computation. Unlike conventional computing with stable runtime profiles, agentic workloads are unpredictable and highly variable. Based on telemetry from…

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A frontier language model is only one component of an AI agent. The surrounding agent system—often called a harness—determines how the model receives...

A frontier language model is only one component of an AI agent. The surrounding agent system—often called a harness—determines how the model receives context, uses tools, maintains state, responds to feedback, recovers from failure, and sustains progress over long-running tasks. The challenge is how to build the agent architecture that makes frontier language models work reliably on extended…

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As AI agents become more capable and operate over longer horizons, building security and trust into the applications they power becomes increasingly important....

As AI agents become more capable and operate over longer horizons, building security and trust into the applications they power becomes increasingly important. Drawing on work with NVIDIA OpenShell, agent developers, open-source projects, and partners across the ecosystem, AI safety and security teams at NVIDIA offer their perspective on the emerging agent stack—including the role of each layer…

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AI agents are only as effective as the context they receive. Even with capable models and well-documented NVIDIA libraries, agents can spend extra steps finding...

AI agents are only as effective as the context they receive. Even with capable models and well-documented NVIDIA libraries, agents can spend extra steps finding the right tools, burn tokens on dead ends, or struggle with specialized tasks. Skills package the instructions, examples, and tool guidance for agents to move faster from intent to solution. To measure whether these skills improve agent…

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Atomistic simulation requires three things: knowledge of the science, compute-efficient implementation of simulations, and accessible interfaces to the...

Atomistic simulation requires three things: knowledge of the science, compute-efficient implementation of simulations, and accessible interfaces to the simulation stack. The first remains the researcher’s domain, as no tool substitutes for knowing what to simulate or recognizing a physically meaningful result. NVIDIA ALCHEMI Toolkit, introduced earlier this year, has dramatically reduced the…

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How autonomous agents broke two decades of capacity planning — and what to build instead

The post Three Generations of Autoscaling — And Why Agentic Traffic Breaks All of Them appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Long-running AI agents spend most of their time on high-volume execution: tool calls, result validation, and subagent delegation. Using a frontier reasoning...

Long-running AI agents spend most of their time on high-volume execution: tool calls, result validation, and subagent delegation. Using a frontier reasoning model for every execution step adds cost and latency. NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an open 30B mixture-of-experts (MoE) model with 3B active parameters built for that execution layer of always-on agents. It is designed for harnesses…

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Building an AI agent does not end with choosing a single model. Each model has its own strengths, weaknesses, and cost profile, which can shift from one...

Building an AI agent does not end with choosing a single model. Each model has its own strengths, weaknesses, and cost profile, which can shift from one workload to another—or even within the same workload. For example, an agentic task may need classification for one step, reasoning for the next, and a smaller model for routine follow-up tasks. Sending every request to the largest model can…

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Storage is an active part of every agentic AI workflow. As agents retrieve enterprise knowledge, access persistent memory, reuse key-value (KV) cache data,...

Storage is an active part of every agentic AI workflow. As agents retrieve enterprise knowledge, access persistent memory, reuse key-value (KV) cache data, execute tools, and generate new results, storage systems must continuously supply and preserve the data that moves the agent reasoning loop. Each agent step can trigger multiple storage operations, and those operations can repeat across…

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A step-by-step guide to building, running, and monitoring a stateful customer support agent using Python, LangGraph, and Langfuse.

The post I Replaced a 15-Minute Booking Process with a LangGraph AI Agent appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Knowledge workers are increasingly integrating AI agents into their workflows. Agents that function as "digital coworkers" offer clear benefits. For example,...

Knowledge workers are increasingly integrating AI agents into their workflows. Agents that function as “digital coworkers” offer clear benefits. For example, they can review a bug report, implement and test a fix, push a patch, and ping a human for review. By handling routine tasks, agents have the potential to deliver large productivity gains. On the other hand, connecting a large language model…

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Deploying an AI coding assistant in a regulated, sovereign, or source-sensitive environment, often comes with challenges. Three common issues are: the source...

Deploying an AI coding assistant in a regulated, sovereign, or source-sensitive environment, often comes with challenges. Three common issues are: the source cannot leave the network, the assistant occasionally invents package names that introduce supply-chain risk, and there is no audit trail when a generated change ships a defect. This tutorial walks you through how to self-host a validated…

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from custom integrations to a universal standard for tool access

The post MCP Explained: How Modern AI Agents Connect to the Real World appeared first on Towards Data Science.

NVIDIA Ising Calibration is an open source vision language model (VLM) designed to interpret diagnostic outputs from quantum processors and determine how they...

NVIDIA Ising Calibration is an open source vision language model (VLM) designed to interpret diagnostic outputs from quantum processors and determine how they should be tuned to continue operating. This post introduces the latest model release, NVIDIA Ising Calibration 1.5, which advances AI-based QPU calibration by analyzing unfamiliar diagnostic results without prior training examples.

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Building a great AI agent isn’t just about choosing the right models. The harness is the architecture surrounding the model. How it renders context, executes...

Building a great AI agent isn’t just about choosing the right models. The harness is the architecture surrounding the model. How it renders context, executes actions, manages state, and decides when a task is done shapes outcomes just as much as the model itself. Harness design alone can account for double-digit swings in benchmark results and significant differences in token cost…

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