AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered agent discovers new algorithms
Result confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
Google DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve combined Gemini models with evolutionary search and automated evaluation to discover new algorithms, including a way to multiply 4×4 complex matrices with 48 scalar multiplications, improving on Strassen’s 1969 algorithm.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Expert-checked
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Announced 14 May 2025
- 4×4 complex-valued matrix multiplication with 48 scalar multiplications
- Matched state of the art on ~75% and improved on ~20% of 50+ open math problems tested, per DeepMind
- A scheduling heuristic recovers on average 0.7% of Google’s worldwide compute resources
- Kissing number in 11 dimensions: lower bound raised from 592 to 593
- The 48-multiplication result is for complex-valued, non-commutative 4×4 multiplication; a June 2025 human follow-up gave a 48-multiplication scheme with rational coefficients (arXiv 2506.13242)
- Nov 2025: Georgiev, Gómez-Serrano, Tao and Wagner applied AlphaEvolve to 67 problems (see related entry)
What happened
DeepMind described an agent that iteratively writes and evaluates code, already deployed across Google’s data centers, chip design and AI training.
Why it matters
A concrete example of LLM-based systems making novel discoveries and improving the infrastructure that trains them — an early form of recursive improvement.
Sources
4 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 4 primary
Primary
- AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms (Google DeepMind)deepmind.google, official
- AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery (arXiv)arxiv.org, paper
- Independent verification of the 48-multiplication algorithm (GitHub)github.com, code
- Human follow-up: 48 multiplications with rational coefficients (arXiv 2506.13242)arxiv.org, paper
Changes
- Added science block, kissing-number fact, verification links
- Filed