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AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

deepmind.google

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Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#111

Post by [deleted] »

moregrist wrote: post #84
vjerancrnjak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genetic algorithm is worse than gradient descent. If variety is sought, why not beam with nice population statistic.

This depends quite a bit of what you’re trying to optimize. Gradient descent is literally following the negative of the gradient to minimize a function. It requires a continuous domain, either analytical or numerical derivatives of the cost function, and has well-known issues in narrow valleys and other complex landscapes. It’s also a local minimization technique and cannot escape local minima by itself. _Stochastic_…

[deleted]

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#112

Post by jerjerjer »

hiddencost wrote: post #22
schmidtleonard wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that GPUs have cache hierarchies and matching block sizes to optimally hit those caches is a big win that you often don't get by default, just because the number of important kernels times important GPUs times effort to properly tune one is greater than what people are willing to do for others for free in open source. Not to mention kernel fusion and API boundaries that socially force suboptimal choices for…

100%. LLMs are extremely useful for doing obvious but repetitive optimizations that a human might miss.

What it essentially does is a debugging/optimization loop where you change one thing, eval, repeat it again and compare results.

Previously we needed to have a human in the loop to do the change. Of course we have automated hyperparameter tuning (and similar things), but that only works only in a rigidly defined search space.

Will we see LLMs generating new improved LLM architectures, now fully incomprehensible to humans?

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#113

Post by xigency »

7373737373 wrote: post #108

anyone else feel out-evolved yet?

Not really, only when looking back at the 60's and 70's when most of the important algorithms I use were invented. For example, LR parsing and A*.

Just wait until the MBA's and politicians learn about this Adam Smith guy. A pipedream now, but maybe in the future schools will be inspired to teach about dialectical reasoning and rediscover Socrates.

[end of snark]

Sorry, I'm getting tired of ad-fueled corporations trying to get me to outsource critical thinking.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#114

Post by factibicongue »

zaken wrote: post #73
moritonal wrote: post #25

For the people awaiting the singularity, lines like this written almost straight from science fiction: > By suggesting modifications in the standard language of chip designers, AlphaEvolve promotes a collaborative approach between AI and hardware engineers to accelerate the design of future specialized chips."

Honestly it's this line that did it for me: > AlphaEvolve enhanced the efficiency of Google's data centers, chip design and AI training processes — *including training the large language models underlying AlphaEvolve itself*. Singularity people have been talking for decades about AI improving itself better than humans could, and how that results in runaway compounding growth of superintelligence, and now it's here.

[flagged]

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#115

Post by curtisblaine »

anticensor wrote: post #26
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #19

Would love for AI to kill the leetcode interview

https://www.interviewcoder.co/ already served that.

Are you sure? From my experience, no AI assistant is fast enough to handle fast-paced questions on the code the candidate just wrote. Also, frequent requests to adjust variable names and deactivating pasting on the page make it extremely laborious for the candidate to get AI to modify the code on the screen.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#116

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

mattlondon wrote: post #36
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

Software engineering will be completely solved. Even systems like v0 are astounding in their ability to generate code, and are very primitive to whats coming. I get downvoted on HN for this opinion, but its truly going to happen. Any system that can produce code, test the code, and iterate if needed will eventually outperform humans. Add in the reinforcement learning, where they can run the code, and train the model…

"Coding" might be solved, but there is more to software engineering than just churning out code - i.e. what should we build? What are the requirements? Are they right? Whats the other dependencies we want to use - AWS or GCP for example? Why those and not others - whats the reason? How does this impact our users and how they use the system? What level of backwards/forwards compatibility do we want? How do we handle r…

Generally the product decisions are not given to the engineers. But yeah, engineers will be tuning, prodding, and poking ai systems to generate the code to match the business requirements.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#117

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

DGAP wrote: post #54
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

Software engineering will be completely solved. Even systems like v0 are astounding in their ability to generate code, and are very primitive to whats coming. I get downvoted on HN for this opinion, but its truly going to happen. Any system that can produce code, test the code, and iterate if needed will eventually outperform humans. Add in the reinforcement learning, where they can run the code, and train the model…

There's cope in the comments about possibility of some software adjacent jobs remaining, which is possible, but the idea of a large number of high paying software jobs remaining by 2030 is a fantasy. Time to learn to be a plumber.

Some huge percentage of all venture capital in the united states is moving towards solving this problem

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#118

Post by quantumHazer »

luckydata wrote: post #104
Workaccount2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few things are more Google than having two distinct teams building two distinct products that are essentially the same thing.

this is the same team and it's pretty obvious they would apply the same ideas to two different problems that can both benefit from it no?

So we are rebranding the same idea every four months and call it a breakthrough?

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#119

Post by baq »

qq12as wrote: post #92

This is great. But how incremental are these advancements? I picked one at random (B.2 -- the second autocorrelation inequality). Then, I looked up the paper that produced the previous state of the art ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.1379 ). It turns out that the authors had themselves found the upper bound by performing a numerical search using "Mathematica 6" (p.4). Not only did the authors consider this as a secondar…

If this is not the beginning of the take off I don’t know what is.

Re: AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms

#120

Post by baq »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #100

Interestingly, it seems alphaevolve has already been in use for a year, and it is just now being publicly shown. The paper also mentions that it uses Gemini 2.0 (pro and flash), which creates a situation where Gemini 2.0 was used in a way to train Gemini 2.5. I don't know if I would call this the fabled "self improving feedback loop", but it seems to have some degree of it. It also begs the question if Alphaevolve wa…

If you have the brain power, the compute and control the hardware, what is there to prevent the take off feedback loop? Deepmind is at this point in the timeline uniquely positioned.
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