Improving the speed and energy-efficiency of AI agents — 2026-06-25

## Short Segments Baidu's Unlimited OCR model revolutionizes long-document parsing by keeping memory usage constant, even as output grows. Today, we'll explore how this 3B-parameter model, with only 500M active parameters, maintains efficiency and speed, parsing dozens of pages in a single pass. Later, we'll dive into MIT and Microsoft's new system that optimizes AI agent workflows for speed and energy efficiency. Baidu's Unlimited OCR model tackles the scaling problem of traditional OCR systems. Most end-to-end OCR models slow down as output grows, with each generated token adding to the KV cache, causing memory to rise and generation to drag. Unlimited OCR addresses this by replacing the decoder's attention with Reference Sliding Window Attention, keeping the KV cache constant. This allows the model to parse dozens of pages in one forward pass under a 32K maximum length, scoring 93.23 on OmniDocBench v1.5, outperforming the DeepSeek OCR baseline by 6.22 points. The model builds on DeepSeek OCR via continue-training, not a from-scratch run, and uses a Mixture-of-Experts design with 3B total parameters but only 500M active at inference. This innovation enables efficient long-document parsing, making it practical for enterprise applications where speed and memory efficiency are crucial. ## Feature Story MIT and Microsoft's new system optimizes AI agent workflows for speed and energy efficiency, transforming how complex tasks are handled. Agentic workflows, which chain together multiple models and external tools, often suffer from inefficiencies that lead to wasted computation, energy, and cost. To address this, researchers developed an intelligent system that streamlines the design of these workflows and automatically optimizes their implementation. Developers can now describe their desired workflow in plain language, without specifying all application details in advance. The system autonomously selects the best models and tools, as well as the ideal hardware configuration and computational resource allocation when executed by a cloud provider. It dynamically adjusts configurations based on user priorities, such as minimizing costs or maximizing speed. When tested on several agentic workloads, this system reduced the number of computational units needed for deployment, significantly cutting energy requirements and costs without compromising performance. Gohar Chaudhry, an EECS graduate student and lead author, highlights the importance of resource optimization in cloud-based workflows, noting that over-allocation can waste energy and money. This development is particularly relevant as agentic workflows become increasingly complex and integral to cloud services. By enabling cloud providers to intelligently optimize these workflows, the system offers a win-win solution for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Looking ahead, this approach could set a new standard for AI workflow management, emphasizing the need for intelligent resource allocation in the face of growing computational demands. As AI continues to evolve, such innovations will be crucial in ensuring sustainable and efficient technology deployment.