Google DeepMind Creates Super-Advanced AI That Can Invent New Algorithms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's DeepMind research division claims its newest AI agent marks a significant step toward using the technology to tackle big problems in math and science. The system, known as AlphaEvolve, is based on the company's Gemini large language models (LLMs), with the addition of an "evolutionary" approach that evaluates and improves algorithms across a range of use cases. AlphaEvolve is essentially an AI coding agent, but it goes deeper than a standard Gemini chatbot. When you talk to Gemini, there is always a risk of hallucination, where the AI makes up details due to the non-deterministic nature of the underlying technology. AlphaEvolve uses an interesting approach to increase its accuracy when handling complex algorithmic problems. According to DeepMind, this AI uses an automatic evaluation system. When a researcher interacts with AlphaEvolve, they input a problem along with possible solutions and avenues to explore. The model generates multiple possible solutions, using the efficient Gemini Flash and the more detail-oriented Gemini Pro, and then each solution is analyzed by the evaluator. An evolutionary framework allows AlphaEvolve to focus on the best solution and improve upon it. Many of the company's past AI systems, for example, the protein-folding AlphaFold, were trained extensively on a single domain of knowledge. AlphaEvolve, however, is more dynamic. DeepMind says AlphaEvolve is a general-purpose AI that can aid research in any programming or algorithmic problem. And Google has already started to deploy it across its sprawling business with positive results. DeepMind's AlphaEvolve AI has optimized Google's Borg cluster scheduler, reducing global computing resource usage by 0.7% -- a significant cost saving at Google's scale. It also outperformed specialized AI like AlphaTensor by discovering a more efficient algorithm for multiplying complex-valued matrices. Additionally, AlphaEvolve proposed hardware-level optimizations for Google's next-gen Tensor chips. The AI remains too complex for public release but that may change in the future as it gets integrated into smaller research tools.
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