About whether AlphaEvolve's algorithm discoveries prove AI can do useful research.
Has this happened?
Yes 85 (73%)Not sure 15 (13%)No 17 (15%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AlphaEvolve's algorithm discoveries prove AI can do useful research.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
It's always "revolutionizing our internal workflows" or "30% of code at Microsoft is AI now" but never improving a codebase you can actually see
Making a significant improvement to the state of the art of one particular algorithm is one thing, but I've seen new tools do that since the 80s
I'll be convinced when LLMs start making valuable pull requests, non-obvious corner cases or non-trivial bugs in mature FOSS projects