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AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

deepmind.google

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

#101
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?

Singularities are a sign that you have a broken model.

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

#102
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…

Why record when it can build in realtime as meeting is going on.

Slack is kinda there with Salesforce - can do a lot already on Agentforce and in Slackbot, but two aren't integrated just yet and Slackbot doesn't support group chats/channels. One interesting aspect in this will be - who has superiority boss, client, analyst or developer?

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

#103
post #9

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

Not a Googler, but I use gemini in JetBrains Junie and have no issues with it. It's cheap, very fast and most importantly actually listens to you.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you doing it on a free plan? I noticed they serve way more 429s on the free plan.

No, for clients we use paid Vertex AI accounts. We often need to host workloads in an EU region, which rules out “global” models (and probably better capacity). In the past, we used a wrapper that round-robined across multiple projects to get enough quota. Luckily, many of our workloads are workflow-style tasks, so we can simply keep retrying on 429s. Fun fact: for one of their services, I think it was Stitch, I noti…

I've been seeing the same in my product; 429s in vertex.

We generally avoid any Google AI for the most part because it's so unreliable.

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

#105
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…

Tacit knowledge is definitionally not recorded in any of these systems. This proposes to solve the problem of tacit knowledge by getting rid of it. It is not clear to me if that solution is either possible or desirable.

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

#106

A fantastically simple solution to improving algorithms, I wish I had this years ago in activation engineering: https://blog.n.ichol.ai/llm-activation-engineering-an-easy-f... How do I access AlphaEvolve?

This is just a flex post. Be a billion dollar company or get out.

They'll likely make it available at some point, but for now one can use OpenEvolve [0] which is not quite as good but should be a good start to use the same LLM-driven evolutionary framework.

[0] https://github.com/algorithmicsuperintelligence/openevolve

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

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're downplaying the AI lobby here. They're eating down copyright laws, something that seemed impossible just a couple of years ago. Screwing privacy laws is just the next step. Also, we are seeing a cultural shift around that as well. Now people bring "AI notetakers" to Zoom calls without even asking for your permission. People are already acting like privacy laws don't exist anymore, it's going to be even easier…

Such invasive practices are pretty disgusting. But I don't think it will be pervasive. Once it spreads, AI vendors and abusive companies will be hold accountable. There is also an obvious conflict, the surveillance will likely be very selective. Programmers have to record everything, while middle managers have a choice to sign off everything. Senior management will of course do whatever but have full insight on the d…

thanks for the downvote anon. its an convenient conversation.

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

#108
post #9

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

Yes. The models are good, the models are fast, and the internal tooling has caught up at this point too. There's a lot of UI/UX/tooling stuff that's still being worked through, integrations with VCS, and solving deeper problems that I probably can't talk about, but I'd say the frustrations of most are about the rate of change much more than the actual abilities.

One thing that's interesting is a bunch of internal thought leaders who swear by the Flash models over the Pro models. Whether this is true or not doesn't really matter, the interesting bit to me is that we are at a point with the models where "better" models are not necessarily more useful, and that faster with more work on the harnesses may be a better trade-off.

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

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Tacit knowledge is definitionally not recorded in any of these systems. This proposes to solve the problem of tacit knowledge by getting rid of it. It is not clear to me if that solution is either possible or desirable.

The labs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars hiring people doing many fairly random (but economically valuable) tasks to collect this tacit knowledge for RL.

It works really well.

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

#110
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Models are starting to get good at ambiguity That's fair, and something I've observed too. I wish I had written "the rest of us shouldn't freak out and quit software today". But here's another data point: At the biotech I work for, writing good code has never been the bottleneck. I actually told my boss that a paid Claude vs free subscription wouldn't be that much value because even if it took every piece of code o…

Ok, but you job is clearly not a good sample for a "job most mortals work on".
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