Almost every agent project now claims to provide “long-term memory.”
For one project, that means embedding chat history. For another, it means maintaining a user profile. A third lets the model edit Markdown files. A fourth builds a bitemporal knowledge graph. All four use the word memory, but they are not the same system and should not be placed on one undifferentiated leaderboard.
To decide whether a system genuinely remembers, I would rather ask three questions:
Aliyun’s CAP has a piece on picking an inference engine that narrows the field to four: Ollama, vLLM, SGLang, and Hugging Face Pipeline. In 2024, that framing was fine.
By 2026, it’s missing half the map. NVIDIA’s TensorRT-LLM has completed its “PyTorch-ification,” SGLang became famous as the first open-source project to reproduce DeepSeek’s large-scale deployment, Hugging Face slapped a “maintenance mode” banner on TGI and told you to switch to vLLM — and the real throughline of the entire 2025 inference landscape can be summed up in one word: disaggregate.