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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

#142

Post by 4b11b4 »

owentbrown wrote: post #141

AlphaEvolve is confirming evidence of an intelligence explosion. The key ingredient for an intelligence explosion is AI accelerating development of AI. This is it. It’s happening.

That's possibly a bit too general and an over statement...

Remember this approach only works for exploring an optimization for an already defined behavior of a function which has an accordingly well defined evaluation metric.

You can't write an evaluation function for each individual piece of or general "intelligence"...

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

#143

Post by empath75 »

prvc wrote: post #102
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…

Merely from your telling, it seems it is no longer "not worth the effort", as "the effort" has been reduced drastically. This is itself significant.

This is exactly why I think the concerns about AI taking people's jobs are overblown. There is not a limited amount of knowledge work to do or things that can be invented or discovered. There's just work that isn't worth the effort, time or money to do right now, it doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's just not cost effective. If you reduce effort, time and money, then suddenly you can do it.

Like even just for programming. I just had an AI instrument my app for tracing, something I wanted to do for a while, but I didn't know how to do and didn't feel like figuring out how to do it. That's not work we were likely to hire someone to do or that would ever get done if the AI wasn't there. It's a small thing, but small things add up.

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

#145

Post by pineaux »

factibicongue wrote: post #128
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."

The singularity has always existed. It is located at the summit of Mount Stupid, where the Darwin Awards are kept. AI is really just psuedo-intelligence; an automated chairlift to peak overconfidence.

I love these confident claims! It sounds like you really know what you are talking about. It's either that or you are projecting. Could you elaborate? I for one find the level of intelligence quite real, I use AIs to do a lot of quite complex stuff for me nowadays. I have an agent that keeps my calendar, schedules appointments with people that want meetings with me, summarizes emails and add these summaries to notion and breaks them up in todo-lists, answers questions about libraries and APIs, writes most of my code (although I do need to hold it's hand and it cannot improve by learning from me).

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

#146

Post by yarri »

Amekedl wrote: post #50
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #16

> AlphaEvolve achieved up to a 32.5% speedup for the FlashAttention kernel implementation in Transformer-based AI models > In roughly 75% of cases, it rediscovered state-of-the-art solutions, to the best of our knowledge. > And in 20% of cases, AlphaEvolve improved the previously best known solutions These sound like incredible results. I'd be curious what kind of improvements were made / what the improvements were.…

I'm thinking reading numbers like this is really just slop lately. FA achieving a 32.5% speed up? Cool. Why not submit it as a PR to the Flash Attention repo then? Can I read about it more in detail?

I assume the Gemini results are JAX/PAX-ML/Pallas improvements for TPUs so would look there for recent PRs

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

#149

Post by mycatisblack »

owentbrown wrote: post #141

AlphaEvolve is confirming evidence of an intelligence explosion. The key ingredient for an intelligence explosion is AI accelerating development of AI. This is it. It’s happening.

I just hope there’s enough time between an actual AI and the “Let’s butcher this to pump out ads”-version to publish a definitive version of wikipedia. After a few days with gemini 2.0 delving into the guts of a spectrum analyser, I’m very impressed by the capabilities. But my cynicism gland is fed by the nature of this everything-as-a-service. To run an LLM on your computer, locally, without internet, is just a few clicks. But that’s not the direction these software behemoths are going.
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