alt Hacker NewsObligatory: Either written by AI or by a human who has spent so much time with AI that they adopted its writing style. Anyways.
> Over 35 hours it performed 432 kernel evaluations. Each cycle meant writing code, compiling it, running it, reading the profiling output, deciding what to change, and trying again. The model diagnosed compilation failures it hadn’t seen before, identified performance bottlenecks through runtime feedback rather than prior knowledge, and redesigned the kernel architecture multiple times when incremental improvements stopped working.
Anyone remember genetic algorithms? This might be an improvement, but it still feels a little like deja vu.
Replies
Genetic algorithm is random. This is intelligent evolution. Big difference.
Key word is non-differentiable optimization. That's what generic algorithms were traditionally good at.
So a LLM wrote 432 kernel variations and it found what was the faster...
Yeah, I remember. I still have Usenet postings about the genetic algorims conference back in the '90s and some magazine clippings about researcher from the University of Sussex where I first learned about genetic algorithms back in high school.