I feel like the topic has been discussed ad nausiem but: * Software security - I.e. Mozilla blog post on using Mythos for software security [1] * Algorithms - AlphaEvolve makes real progress on matrix multiplication [2] * Open source - Backlog crushing in openvpn [3] * Corporate - CloudFlare Oauth workers [4] People are clearly using AI to ship real work that people end up using directly or indirectly. Projects like Godot are also in a weird spot though. [1]. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131 [3] https://stanislas.blog/2025/12/claude-code-opus-open-source-... [4] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider
AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery
Alexander Novikov, Ngân Vũ, Marvin Eisenberger
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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
2025 · arXiv
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From the abstract
In this white paper, we present AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent that substantially enhances capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs on highly challenging tasks such as tackling open scientific problems or optimizing critical pieces of computational infrastructure. AlphaEvolve orchestrates an autonomous pipeline of LLMs, whose task is to improve an algorithm by making direct changes to the code. Using an evolutionary approach, continuously receiving feedback from one or more evaluators, AlphaEvolve iteratively improves the algorithm, potentially leading to new scientific and practical discoveries. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by applying it to a number of important computational problems. When applied to optimizing critical components of large-scale computational stacks at Google, AlphaEvolve developed a more efficient scheduling algorithm for data centers, found a functionally equivalent simplification in the circuit design of hardware accelerators, and accelerated the training of the LLM underpinning AlphaEvolve itself. Furthermore, AlphaEvolve discovered novel, provably correct algorithms that surpass state-of-the-art solutions on a spectrum of problems in mathematics and computer science, significantly expanding the scope of prior automated discovery methods (Romera-Paredes et al., 2023). Notably, AlphaEvolve developed a search algorithm that found a procedure to multiply two $4 \times 4$ complex-valued matrices using $48$ scalar multiplications; offering the first improvement, after 56 years, over Strassen's algorithm in this setting. We believe AlphaEvolve and coding agents like it can have a significant impact in improving solutions of problems across many areas of science and computation.
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so basically just brute force the kernel. there are more elegant ways to leverage an LLM, see AlphaEvolve: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131 it's difficult to frame most coding tasks in such a way where you can trivially verify correctness.
LLMs are wordsmith oracles. A lot of effort went into trying to coax interactive intelligence from them but the truth is that you could have probably always harnessed the base models directly to do very useful things. The instruct tuned models give your harness even more degrees of freedom. A while ago, the autoresearch[1] harness went viral, yet it's but a highly simplified version of AlphaEvolve[2][3][4]. In the cybersecury context, you can envision a clever harness that probes every function in a codebase for vulnerabilities, then bubbles the candidates up to their callsites (and probes whether the vulnerability can be triggered from there) and then all the way to an…
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interface (such as a syscall) where a potential exploit can be manifested. And those would be the low hanging fruit, other vulnerabilities may require the interplay of multiple functions. Or race conditions. [1] <https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch> [2] <https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-co...> [3] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131> [4] <https://github.com/algorithmicsuperintelligence/openevolve>
It doesn't mention it in the article, but guessing this is based on / inspired by AlphaEvolve? Though I'm not sure the public can access AlphaEvolve yet. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131)
> Am I the only one who wasn’t particularly impressed by AutoResearch? isn't it just a nerfed AlphaEvolve? https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131
Keep following the thread.
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