Google AlphaEvolve - Discovering new science (exclusive interview)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Today GoogleDeepMind released AlphaEvolve: a Gemini coding agent for algorithm discovery. It beat the famous Strassen algorithm for matrix multiplication set 56 years ago. Google has been killing it recently. We had early access to the paper and interviewed the researchers behind the work.

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

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/

Authors: Alexander Novikov*, Ngân Vũ*, Marvin Eisenberger*, Emilien Dupont*, Po-Sen Huang*, Adam Zsolt Wagner*, Sergey Shirobokov*, Borislav Kozlovskii*, Francisco J. R. Ruiz, Abbas Mehrabian, M. Pawan Kumar, Abigail See, Swarat Chaudhuri, George Holland, Alex Davies, Sebastian Nowozin, Pushmeet Kohli, Matej Balog*

(* indicates equal contribution or special designation, if defined elsewhere)

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AlphaEvolve works like a very smart, tireless programmer. It uses powerful AI language models (like Gemini) to generate ideas for computer code. Then, it uses an "evolutionary" process – like survival of the fittest for programs. It tries out many different program ideas, automatically tests how well they solve a problem, and then uses the best ones to inspire new, even better programs.

Beyond this mathematical breakthrough, AlphaEvolve has already been used to improve real-world systems at Google, such as making their massive data centers run more efficiently and even speeding up the training of the AI models that power AlphaEvolve itself. The discussion also covers how humans work with AlphaEvolve, the challenges of making AI discover things, and the exciting future of AI helping scientists make new discoveries.

In short, AlphaEvolve is a powerful new AI tool that can invent new algorithms and solve complex problems, showing how AI can be a creative partner in science and engineering.

Guests:

Matej Balog: https://x.com/matejbalog

Alexander Novikov: https://x.com/SashaVNovikov

REFS:

MAP Elites [Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Jeff Clune]

https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04909

FunSearch [Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Mohammadamin Barekatain, Alexander Novikov, Matej Balog, M. Pawan Kumar, Emilien Dupont, Francisco J. R. Ruiz, Jordan S. Ellenberg, Pengming Wang, Omar Fawzi, Pushmeet Kohli & Alhussein Fawzi]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06924-6

TOC:

[00:00:00] Introduction: Alpha Evolve's Breakthroughs, DeepMind's Lineage, and Real-World Impact

[00:12:06] Introducing AlphaEvolve: Concept, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Architecture

[00:16:56] Search Challenges: The Halting Problem and Enabling Creative Leaps

[00:23:20] Knowledge Augmentation: Self-Generated Data, Meta-Prompting, and Library Learning

[00:29:08] Matrix Multiplication Breakthrough: From Strassen to AlphaEvolve's 48 Multiplications

[00:39:11] Problem Representation: Direct Solutions, Constructors, and Search Algorithms

[00:46:06] Developer Reflections: Surprising Outcomes and Superiority over Simple LLM Sampling

[00:51:42] Algorithmic Improvement: Hill Climbing, Program Synthesis, and Intelligibility

[01:00:24] Real-World Application: Complex Evaluations and Robotics

[01:05:39] Role of LLMs & Future: Advanced Models, Recursive Self-Improvement, and Human-AI Collaboration

[01:11:22] Resource Considerations: Compute Costs of AlphaEvolve

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