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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

#221
Did you see that halluzination in the paper?

It optimized

   initializers.normal (0.0
to

   initializers.normal (0 + 1j * 0,

I thought the results were being reviewed?

Anyway, impressive results. That's why OpenAI and Elon were so frightened about Hassabi.

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

#222
post #221

Did you see that halluzination in the paper? It optimized initializers.normal (0.0 to initializers.normal (0 + 1j * 0, I thought the results were being reviewed? Anyway, impressive results. That's why OpenAI and Elon were so frightened about Hassabi.

I mean that is changing the dtype, perhaps that's relevant.

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

#223

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…

> which creates a situation where Gemini 2.0 was used in a way to train Gemini 2.5. The use of synthetic data from prior models to create both superior models and distilled models has been going on since at least OpenAI's introduction of RLHF, and probably before that too.

> The use of synthetic data from prior models

That’s distinct from those prior models providing actual code to improve the next model

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

#224
post #189
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")…

> Farmers today are not respected / valued for their work?

Pretty much most of them feel underpaid for the amount of hard work and I hear they're having problem recruiting younger people to the business, so many foreigners take those jobs.

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

#226

This looks like something that can (and should) be reimplemented open-source. It doesn't look like a particularly daunting project.

I've been working on something very similar as a tool for my own AI research -- though I don't have the success they claim. Mine often plateaus on the optimization metric. I think there's secret sauce in the meta-prompting and meta-heuristic comments from the paper that are quite vague, but it makes sense -- it changes the dynamics of the search space and helps the LLM get out of ruts. I'm now going to try to integrate some ideas based off of my interpretation of their work to see how it goes.

If it goes well, I could open source it.

What are the things you would want to optimize with such a framework? (So far I've been focusing on optimizing ML training and architecture search itself). Hearing other ideas would help motivate me to open source if there's real demand for something like this.

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

#227
One of the researchers quoted in Nature link here... in the past, when DeepMind published "AlphaTensor" [1][2] in October 2022, it took a single day (!!), see [3], for improvements to the AlphaTensor-based scheme to be discovered. This was then a few months later generalized into a significantly more comprehensive scheme [4]. I do not know whether the more general scheme that was discovered in [4] made its way back to some improved version of AlphaTensor - but this nonetheless shows that AlphaEvolve may also change, as it becomes absorbed by the community.

[1] Blog: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/discovering-novel-algo...

[2] Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4

[3] arxiv.org/pdf/2210.04045

[4] arxiv.org/abs/2212.01175 Flip graphs for matrix multiplication

(Reposted from here, where I made a mini deep-dive into this: https://x.com/friederrrr/status/1922846803420119410?t=7jZ34P...)

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

#228

This looks like something that can (and should) be reimplemented open-source. It doesn't look like a particularly daunting project.

Yep, agree.

Had mentioned the same on X: https://x.com/friederrrr/status/1922850981181784152?t=usXpK1...

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

#229

This looks like something that can (and should) be reimplemented open-source. It doesn't look like a particularly daunting project.

I've been working on something very similar as a tool for my own AI research -- though I don't have the success they claim. Mine often plateaus on the optimization metric. I think there's secret sauce in the meta-prompting and meta-heuristic comments from the paper that are quite vague, but it makes sense -- it changes the dynamics of the search space and helps the LLM get out of ruts. I'm now going to try to integra…

This does seem similar to what has been done in the neural architecture search domain, doesn't it?

In my case, I'd mainly be interested in mathematics: I'd provide a mathematical problem and a baseline algorithm for it and would want an open source framework to be able to improve on that.

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

#230

This looks like something that can (and should) be reimplemented open-source. It doesn't look like a particularly daunting project.

I've been working on something very similar as a tool for my own AI research -- though I don't have the success they claim. Mine often plateaus on the optimization metric. I think there's secret sauce in the meta-prompting and meta-heuristic comments from the paper that are quite vague, but it makes sense -- it changes the dynamics of the search space and helps the LLM get out of ruts. I'm now going to try to integra…

I work in the field of medical image processing. I haven't thought particularly hard about it, but I'm sure I could find a ton of use cases if I wanted to.
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