Yeah, in typical Google fashion they used to have two deep learning teams: Google Brain and DeepMind. Google Brain was Google’s in-house team, responsible for inventing the transformer. DeepMind focused more on RL agents than Google Brain, hence discoveries like AlphaZero and AlphaFold.

The general framework for evolutionary methods/genetic algorithms is indeed old but it’s extremely broad. What matters is how you actually mutate the algorithm being run given feedback. In this case, they’re using the same framework as genetic algorithms (iteratively building up solutions by repeatedly modifying an existing attempt after receiving feedback) but they use an LLM for two things:

1. Overall better sampling (the LLM has better heuristics for figuring out what to fix compared to handwritten techniques), meaning higher efficiency at finding a working solution.

2. “Open set” mutations: you don’t need to pre-define what changes can be made to the solution. The LLM can generate arbitrary mutations instead. In particular, AlphaEvolve can modify entire codebases as mutations, whereas prior work only modified single functions.

The “Related Work” (section 5) section of their whitepaper is probably what you’re looking for, see here.

40 series to 30 series was pretty tangible IMO (4090 gets something like 30-50% more perf in most tasks than 3090 Ti with the same TDP), in part thanks to the much higher L2 cache plus newer process node.

50 series was very poor though, probably because it’s the same process node.

Unfortunately proprietary professional software suites are still usually better than their FOSS counterparts. For instance Altium Designer vs KiCAD for ECAD, and Solidworks vs FreeCAD. That’s not to say the open source tools are bad. I use them myself all the time. But the proprietary tools usually are more robust (for instance, it is fairly easy to break models in FreeCAD if you aren’t careful) and have better workflows for creating really complex designs.

I’ll also add that Lightroom is still better than Darktable and RawTherapee for me. Both of the open source options are still good, but Lightroom has better denoising in my experience. It also is better at supporting new cameras and lenses compared to the open source options.

With time I’m sure the open source solutions will improve and catch up to the proprietary ones. KiCAD and FreeCAD are already good enough for my needs, but that may not have been true if I were working on very complex projects.