I took it as obvious that this sort of thing wouldn’t meet Tsvi’s bar. AlphaEvolve seems quite unsurprising to me. We have seen other examples of using LLMs to guide program search. Tsvi and I do have disagreements about how far that sort of thing can take us, but I don’t think AlphaEvolve provides clear evidence on that question. Of course LLMs can concentrate the probability mass moderately well, improving brute-force search. Not clear how far that can take us.
I took it as obvious that this sort of thing wouldn’t meet Tsvi’s bar. AlphaEvolve seems quite unsurprising to me. We have seen other examples of using LLMs to guide program search. Tsvi and I do have disagreements about how far that sort of thing can take us, but I don’t think AlphaEvolve provides clear evidence on that question. Of course LLMs can concentrate the probability mass moderately well, improving brute-force search. Not clear how far that can take us.