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

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

#201

Post by nickpsecurity »

aseg wrote: post #136

Finally—something directly relevant to my research ( https://trishullab.github.io/lasr-web/ ). Below are my take‑aways from the blog post, plus a little “reading between the lines.” - One lesson DeepMind drew from AlphaCode, AlphaTensor, and AlphaChip is that large‑scale pre‑training, combined with carefully chosen inductive biases, enables models to solve specialized problems at—or above—human performance. - These s…

Non-expert here who likes reading lots of this kind of research. I have a few questions.

1. Why does it need a zeroth order optimizer?

2. Most GA's I've seen use thousands of solutions. Sometimes ten thousand or more. What leads you to use 60,000 calls per iteration?

3. How do you use populations and "islands?" I never studied using islands.

4. You said the smaller models are often better for "shorter" code. That makes sense. I've seen people extend the context of model with training passes. You think it would help to similarly shrink a larger model to a smaller context instead of using the small models?

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

#202

Post by thatguysaguy »

lionkor wrote: post #190

Show the training set, and PROVE that the tasks and answers aren't in there. I don't understand why this is not a default first step for proving that this is creating new knowledge.

Are you claiming that for the open problems they give record-breaking solutions for, there were just answers on the web waiting to be found?

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

#203

Post by nebula8804 »

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."

We are further getting to the point where no one on the planet understand how any of this stuff really works. This will last us until a collapse. Then we are done for.

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

#204

Post by Skylyz »

czl wrote: post #189
geodel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not some very explicit threshold beyond which AI will take job but before it won't. What's already happening is long drawn attrition where tools at different level of code, low code , no code will keep creeping up. And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop…

> And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether. Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower")…

And the invention of AGI will have the same impact as the electricity, i mean, they're both inventions, right ? I can't wait for all these billions of new full time jobs coming to replace the current ones.

Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill.

Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 80% of the workforce was working in agriculture, it'd have been a cataclysm.

I'm pretty sure there is a slight widespread lack of respect for software engineers, mainly offset by their high salaries. Wait and see once vibecoding becomes the new norm.

And for software engineers, yeah, automation will wreck their jobs and their paychecks because software engineering's higher speed limit in efficiency is the speed of light, not a tractor's.

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

#205

Post by geodel »

czl wrote: post #189
geodel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not some very explicit threshold beyond which AI will take job but before it won't. What's already happening is long drawn attrition where tools at different level of code, low code , no code will keep creeping up. And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop…

> And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether. Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower")…

Your point is about as good as saying that "Is my life worse off at home since I can clean whole area in 30 min of mild effort with my cordless vacuum cleaner where as manual broom would've taken me at half day of hard work?"

Of course my life is bit better as I saved few hours on weekend as owner of house and a vacuum cleaner.

But my life as worker is worse in last 10 years as knowledge of developing large complex applications is not valuable because we are in Next Gen Cloud native era where one application will not contain more than 5 functions anyway. Even if I claim I can write better maintainable, performance code , the employer directly or indirectly says "Well we don't care, we need you to complete these 10 JIRAs in this sprint" And only answer they take from me is yes.

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

#206

Post by UltraSane »

codr7 wrote: post #177
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That right and In fact it’s the core purpose of the tool. This is complex automation which by definition compresses the solution into a computable process that works more efficiently than the non-automated process That, in fact, is the revolutionary part - you’re changing how energy is used to solve the problem.

Faster, yes; more efficiently...I guess that's why they're funding nuclear plants then?

GPUs are VASTLY more energy efficient than humans!

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

#208

Post by dymk »

antihipocrat wrote: post #184
nowittyusername wrote: post #180

This is an important moment. We now have verifiable evidence that these systems can do new useful research that has actual value in the real world. That 1% savings is only the start as well. I would expect the compounding number of gains to be significant over some time. Also in a way this process was used to make gemini 2.5 pro better, so its like a baby step towards recursive self improvement. Not fully automated y…

Is it new? I'm getting mixed messages from the posts here. On one side there is evidence that 48 and 46 multiplication solutions have been known (and could have found themselves in the model training data). On the other side I see excitement that the singularity is here. If the latter were the case surely we wouldn't be reading about it in a published paper, we would already know.

Let's assume that the 46 multiplication algorithm was known, prior to AlphaEvolve re-discovering it. AlphaEvolve still has made an improvement to a performance critical area that has had likely had thousands of engineer-hours put into it. None of those engineers apparently knew about the improved algorithm, or were able to implement the algorithm. This is empirical evidence of an LLM outperforming its (domain expert) human counterparts.

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

#209

Post by cavisne »

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.…

From the paper it was a speedup on the XLA GPU kernel they wrote using Jax, which is probably not SOTA. I don't think Jax even has a official flash attention implementation.

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

#210

Post by geodel »

Skylyz wrote: post #204
czl wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it will start with people are not respected or valued for their work, so they can leave, once left, they will not be replaced or replaced lower skilled folks and at some point that position stop existing altogether. Automation changed farming for the worse? Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work? Farmers were replaced with low skilled labor? Do you think the job of a farmer (aka "food grower")…

And the invention of AGI will have the same impact as the electricity, i mean, they're both inventions, right ? I can't wait for all these billions of new full time jobs coming to replace the current ones. Farmers couldn't be replaced by low skill labor because they are low skill. Farmer didn't stop existing, but we went from 80% of the population farming is to 1-10%. If farming automation had happened in 1800 when 8…

Great points. Besides if one look around even today beyond people who somehow still succeeding at software hustle, there are already tons of people fallen off IT gravy train. A lot of manual testers who would make decent living are now eliminated by automation. Software document writers jobs are kind of gone. Developers are supposed to create document themselves on Confluent wiki etc. A lot of prized SAP consultants and such from past are now downgraded to generic mid level project managers / IT managers if they were hold onto IT jobs at all.

I can list lot more jobs e.g exchange admins, app server admins, DBAs, they are either gone or far fewer available. And lot of people were not able to up-skill and fell out of race in just a matter of 15-20 years.

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