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AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

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

#41

Post by kubb »

dinfinity wrote: post #33
momojo wrote: 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?

Not in the next decade. Won't get funded.

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

#42

Post by pilooch »

AlphaEvolve couples map-elites with LLMs. It's an key step in machine learning, in the vein of DQN for reinforcement learning.

AE brings diversity from the genetic algorithms community to large scale optmized deep learning and RL models.

It is a mandatory step for moving forward. The approach is clean and simple, while generic.

The only caveats is the per optimization problem definition of the map élites dimensions. But surely, this will get tackled somehow over the next few years.

If you don't know about map-elites, go look up Jean-Baptiste Mouret' s work and talks, it's both very interesting and universal.

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

#45

Post by aleksiy123 »

pingou wrote: 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?

Self improving, doesn’t necessarily imply singularity right?

There still could be hard constraints to make singularity intractable or just such a long time horizon it’s not practical right?

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

#46

Post by throw310822 »

Leynos wrote: post #39
dakolli wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know, I guess it depends from a) how many hours per month you spend answering emails, and b) how much more revenue you could get in that same time. $200 should be reasonably 2/3 hours of work? So that's about the amount of saved time per month to break even on your subscription. It's a steal.

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

#47

Post by [deleted] »

poisonfountain wrote: post #34
momojo wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by aleksiy123 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #17
carbocation wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> He says the problem is that they can't use Claude Code because it's the enemy, and Gemini has never been good enough to capture people's workflows like Claude has, so basically agentic coding just never really took off inside Google. They're all just plodding along, completely oblivious to what's happening out there right now. This is a bunch of gabagoo. Wrong on so many layers, it's not even worth reading further.…

Agreed, however imo there is def some problems unique to Google which is making the internal experience less than ideal.

Hoping they can figure it out sooner rather than later.

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

#49

Post by risyachka »

poisonfountain wrote: post #34
momojo wrote: 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…

In coding the ambiguity is very, very limited and constrained compared to any non dev job that involves any decision making

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

#50

Post by dinfinity »

kubb wrote: post #41
dinfinity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not in the next decade. Won't get funded.

Private investment in the US has grown from 100 billion in 2024 to almost 300 billion USD in 2025 [0]. Add public investments worldwide and private investments in at least China and Europe.

I'm pretty sure money is not going to be the blocker.

[0] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

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