{"type":"post","id":"vals-ai-launched-the-inference-provider-index-comparing-60fbd1","slug":"vals-ai-launched-the-inference-provider-index-comparing-60fbd1","title":"Vals AI launched the Inference Provider Index comparing open-weight model endpoints on agentic tasks.","description":"Vals AI has published the Inference Provider Index, a comparison of endpoints serving the same open-weight models on multi-step agent tasks.","retrieval_nugget":"Vals AI has published the Inference Provider Index, a comparison of endpoints serving the same open-weight models on multi-step agent tasks.","published_at":"2026-10-24","updated_at":"2026-10-24","record_date":"2026-10-24","date_kind":"published_at","topics":["agent-economics","model-routing"],"entities":["Vals AI","Inference Provider Index","DeepSeek V4.1 Flash","Kimi K3","MiniMax M3","Together AI","Fireworks","Baseten"],"related_patterns":["agent-economics-moves-to-completed-work","harness-architecture-outlives-model-choice"],"novelty_label":"new_fact","what_changed":"Vals AI has launched a separate index comparing inference providers on agentic tasks, finding up to 2.3× cost differences for the same model and that first-party APIs were neither cheapest nor fastest.","prior_refs":["memory:8e300951-d712-8cd6-a209-8b4bcba4f2e6","memory:8e27a4a1-85d0-8284-a85b-06f3f8600b47"],"source_url":"https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/inference_provider","source_urls":["https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/inference_provider"],"schema_version":"newruntime-agent-readable-v0.2","stable_id":"post:vals-ai-launched-the-inference-provider-index-comparing-60fbd1","status":"published","visuals":[],"editor":{"role":"editor","name":"Andrey Reshetnikov","profile":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.md","profile_json":"https://newruntime.com/owner-profile.json","same_as":["https://www.linkedin.com/in/reshetnikov1/","https://t.me/lapetuse"]},"routes":{"html":"https://newruntime.com/posts/vals-ai-launched-the-inference-provider-index-comparing-60fbd1/","markdown":"https://newruntime.com/posts/vals-ai-launched-the-inference-provider-index-comparing-60fbd1.md","json":"https://newruntime.com/posts/vals-ai-launched-the-inference-provider-index-comparing-60fbd1.json"},"next_reads":[{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/agent-economics/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics/","title":"Agent Economics","reason":"Explore the agent-economics topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/agent-economics.json"},{"type":"topic","path":"/topics/model-routing/","url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/model-routing/","title":"Model Routing","reason":"Explore the model-routing topic hub.","media_type":"text/html","markdown_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/model-routing.md","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/topics/model-routing.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/posts/","url":"https://newruntime.com/posts/","title":"Field Notes","reason":"Open the latest editorial analysis.","media_type":"text/html","json_url":"https://newruntime.com/posts.json"},{"type":"collection","path":"/source-ledger.json","url":"https://newruntime.com/source-ledger.json","title":"Source Ledger","reason":"Inspect the public source evidence graph.","media_type":"application/json"}]}