Weco let an AI coding agent rewrite the harness around a fixed language model for eight days. Zhengyao Jiang explains what the reported gains show, where the evidence stops short of recursive self-improvement, how reward hacking complicates evaluation, and why human-designed abstractions still anchor the search.
Elie Bakouch, a research engineer at Prime Intellect, reports on setting Claude Code and Codex loose on the community Optimizer Speedrun, a race to train a GPT-2-level model in the fewest steps. Both agents beat the human record, but they behaved very differently, and none of them invented a new optimizer. The talk closes with a proposed AlphaEvolve-style discovery loop and an argument for doing this research openly.
Pushmeet Kohli, head of AI for Science at DeepMind, discusses AlphaEvolve, an AI system that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) coupled with evolutionary search to discover novel, human-interpretable algorithms. He explains the architecture, from its predecessor FunSearch to the multi-agent "Co-scientist" system, and details breakthroughs in solving decades-old math problems and optimizing real-world systems like data center scheduling and chip design.