DeepMind unveils 'spectacular' general-purpose science AI

Summary

DeepMind says that AlphaEvolve has helped to improve the design of AI chips.Credit: Christian Ohde/IMAGO via AlamyGoogle DeepMind has used chatbot models to come up with solutions to major problems in mathematics and computer science.The system, called AlphaEvolve, combines the creativity of a large language model (LLM) with algorithms that can scrutinize the model’s suggestions to filter and improve solutions. It was described in a white paper released by the company on 14 May.DeepMind hits milestone in solving maths problems — AI’s next grand challenge“The paper is quite spectacular,” says Mario Krenn, who leads the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. “I think AlphaEvolve is the first successful demonstration of new discoveries based on general-purpose LLMs.”As well as using the system to discover solutions to open maths problems, DeepMind has already applied the artificial intelligence (AI) technique to its own practical challenges, says Pushmeet Kohli, head of science at the firm in London.AlphaEvolve has helped to improve the design of the company’s next generation of tensor processing units — computing chips developed specially for AI — and has found a way to more efficiently exploit Google’s worldwide computing capacity, saving 0.7% of total resources. “It has had substantial impact,” says Kohli.General-purpose AIMost of the successful applications of AI in science so far — including the protein-designing tool AlphaFold — have involved a learning algorithm that was hand-crafted for its task, says Krenn. But AlphaEvolve is general-purpose, tapping the abilities of LLMs to generate code to solve problems in a wide range of domains.DeepMind describes AlphaEvolve as an ‘agent’, because it involves using interacting AI models. But it targets a different point in the scientific process from many other ‘agentic’ AI science systems, which have been used to review the literature and suggest hypotheses.Alp...