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zakenyesterday at 5:21 PM3 repliesview on HN

Honestly it's this line that did it for me:

> AlphaEvolve enhanced the efficiency of Google's data centers, chip design and AI training processes — *including training the large language models underlying AlphaEvolve itself*.

Singularity people have been talking for decades about AI improving itself better than humans could, and how that results in runaway compounding growth of superintelligence, and now it's here.


Replies

dgacmuyesterday at 6:54 PM

Most code optimizations end up looking somewhat asymptotic towards a non-zero minimum.

If it takes you a week to find a 1% speedup, and the next 0.7% speedup takes you 2 weeks to find ... well, by using the 1% speedup the next one only takes you 13.86 days. This kind of small optimization doesn't lead to exponential gains.

That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile - it's great to save power & money and reduce iteration time by a small amount. And it combines with other optimizations over time. But this is in no way an example of the kind of thing that the singularity folks envisioned, regardless of the realism of their vision or not.

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factibicongueyesterday at 6:25 PM

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