Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning So how about an AI story that isn’t generative AI. To quote the Nature abstract:
Whereas remarkable progress has been achieved in the past, making further improvements on the efficiency of these routines has proved challenging for both human scientists and computational approaches. Here we show how artificial intelligence can go beyond the current state of the art by discovering hitherto unknown routines. To realize this, we formulated the task of finding a better sorting routine as a single-player game. We then trained a new deep reinforcement learning agent, AlphaDev, to play this game. AlphaDev discovered small sorting algorithms from scratch that outperformed previously known human benchmarks.
Not earth-shattering, not an all-new fundamental sorting algorithm, but achieving a 1% to 5% improvement on code that runs a trillion times a day is meaningful. Already merged with LLVM so it will make its way into real code.