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AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

deepmind.google

31–40 of 159 posts

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#31
post #9

Are Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)

Last month, Steve Yegge suggested that they are not: https://xcancel.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043747998740689171

There is value in the "eating your own dog food".

If internal staff aren't happy with the tools they build, typically that should drive improvements to their own tools

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#32
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demis Hassabis chimed in on that thread and called it what it is: clickbait.

I’m not so sure. From talking to some of my own friends at google they feel that antigravity/gemini models are handicapping them and would much rather be using claude code (which only deepmind gets to use)

Sure, but there's cavernous distance between "google = john deere" and "darn I have to use Gemini"

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#33
post #25

This reminds me of Antirez's "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" [0] In a sentence: These foundation models are really good at optimizing these extremely high level, extremely well defined problem spaces (ie multiply matrices faster). In Antirez's case, it's "make Redis faster". There have been two reactions: "Oh it would never work for me" and "I have seen months of my life accomplished in an hour", and I think they'…

> I think the rest of us should rest easy knowing that LLM's can't [...]

What if (when?) (AI-assisted) research moves AI beyond LLMs? Do you think that can't happen?

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#34
post #25

This reminds me of Antirez's "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" [0] In a sentence: These foundation models are really good at optimizing these extremely high level, extremely well defined problem spaces (ie multiply matrices faster). In Antirez's case, it's "make Redis faster". There have been two reactions: "Oh it would never work for me" and "I have seen months of my life accomplished in an hour", and I think they'…

>I think the rest of us should rest easy knowing that LLM's can't (and maybe were never meant to) tackle the tacit-knowledge-filled, human-system-centric, ambiguously-defined-problem-space jobs most mortals work

I don't believe that anymore, to be honest. Models are starting to get good at ambiguity. Claude Code now asks me when something is ambiguous. Soon, all meetings will be recorded, transcribed and stored in a well-indexed place for the agents to search when faced with ambiguity (free startup idea here!). If they can ask you now, they'll be able to search for the answers themselves once that's possible. In fact, they already do it now if you have a well-documented Notion/Confluence, it's just that nobody has.

It's probably harder to RL for "identify ambiguity" than RL'ing for performance algorithms, sure, but it's not impossible and it's in the works. It's just a matter of time now.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#35
post #25

This reminds me of Antirez's "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" [0] In a sentence: These foundation models are really good at optimizing these extremely high level, extremely well defined problem spaces (ie multiply matrices faster). In Antirez's case, it's "make Redis faster". There have been two reactions: "Oh it would never work for me" and "I have seen months of my life accomplished in an hour", and I think they'…

I'd say it's a malefactor of:

1. Amazing, you just tweaked 1% efficiency

2. You idiot, you just spent an hour trying to trouble shoot a hallucinated api.

On average, it's really hard to tell which ones going to win here.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#36
post #6

AI improving itself (or at least the architecture it runs on), the singularity is near as they say. Do we have other examples of AI being used to improve the LLMs, apart for the creation of synthetic data and the testing of the models?

The hard part about this is for every few 'WOW', there's a lineage of 'you dumbass'.

I mean, if you can create aharrness to filter these two, sure, singularity away; it's really hard to see how someones gonna do that.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#37
post #25

This reminds me of Antirez's "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" [0] In a sentence: These foundation models are really good at optimizing these extremely high level, extremely well defined problem spaces (ie multiply matrices faster). In Antirez's case, it's "make Redis faster". There have been two reactions: "Oh it would never work for me" and "I have seen months of my life accomplished in an hour", and I think they'…

I'd say it's a malefactor of: 1. Amazing, you just tweaked 1% efficiency 2. You idiot, you just spent an hour trying to trouble shoot a hallucinated api. On average, it's really hard to tell which ones going to win here.

Its not hard to tell at all, just look at how much it costs to run a 10T param model (especially with parallelized agents). Those costs are not worth the occasional slot machine-eque jackpot you get. For an entity like Google it might be worth it, but that's it. They definitely aren't going to let us use these things for cost they are now for much longer.

Imagine going back to 2020 and tell people in 6 years going to be able to spend $200.00 a month and be able to spin up $2mm in GPUs at full throttle to respond to your emails. None of this makes sense.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#38
post #16
post #9

Are Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)

The point of dogfooding is exactly that: if we're unhappy, we're the ones to improve.

the engineers using gemini have no control over deepmind

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's a malefactor of: 1. Amazing, you just tweaked 1% efficiency 2. You idiot, you just spent an hour trying to trouble shoot a hallucinated api. On average, it's really hard to tell which ones going to win here.

Its not hard to tell at all, just look at how much it costs to run a 10T param model (especially with parallelized agents). Those costs are not worth the occasional slot machine-eque jackpot you get. For an entity like Google it might be worth it, but that's it. They definitely aren't going to let us use these things for cost they are now for much longer. Imagine going back to 2020 and tell people in 6 years going to…

You don't pay for a £200 a month account to respond to your emails, and if you are, I would tell you that you're wasting your money.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#40
post #25

This reminds me of Antirez's "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" [0] In a sentence: These foundation models are really good at optimizing these extremely high level, extremely well defined problem spaces (ie multiply matrices faster). In Antirez's case, it's "make Redis faster". There have been two reactions: "Oh it would never work for me" and "I have seen months of my life accomplished in an hour", and I think they'…

>I think the rest of us should rest easy knowing that LLM's can't (and maybe were never meant to) tackle the tacit-knowledge-filled, human-system-centric, ambiguously-defined-problem-space jobs most mortals work.

A Statement all but guaranteed to look incredibly short sighted by 2030.

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