We’re still early into the AI revolution, but the stage could be already being set for the march towards superintelligence.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said that the “flywheels are spinning fast” after a Google coding agent showed that it could discover new algorithms and approaches. “Knowledge begets more knowledge, algorithms optimising other algorithms – we are using AlphaEvolve to optimise our AI ecosystem, the flywheels are spinning fast…” Hassabis posted on X.
The AlphaEvolve that Hassabis was referring to is Google’s newly-released coding agent for algorithm discovery. The agent is powered by Gemini, and Google says it is able to design faster matrix multiplication algorithms, find new solutions to math problems, and make data centers, chip design and AI training more efficient across the company.
“We applied AlphaEvolve to over 50 open problems in analysis, geometry, combinatorics and number theory, including the kissing number problem,” Google said. “In 75% of cases, it rediscovered the best solution known so far. In 20% of cases, it improved upon the previously best known solutions, thus yielding new discoveries.”
Several AI researchers have said that AI will lead to new scientific discoveries. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI will be able to do a century’s worth of research in 5-10 years. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has said that AI agents will soon come up with novel scientific discoveries and theorems, and OpenAI board member Bret Taylor has said that AI will spur scientific progress by combining knowledge across specializations. AI agents, once they become as capable as human researchers, can be endlessly replicated, and deployed towards solving problems without breaks that their human counterparts might need. The sheer scale of their deployment — the only cost of running an AI researcher will eventually be the electricity costs in running them — will mean that these researchers will inevitably come up with new discoveries. These new discoveries can in turn be used to come up with even better AI assistants and newer discoveries, resulting in a flywheel, as Hassabis put it, of scientific progress. And with Google’s AlphaEvolve already coming up with new research and algorithms, the AI-assisted flywheels of scientific progress seem to have already begun turning.