When AI Discovers The Next Transformer - Robert Lange (Sakana)

About this episode

Robert Lange discusses the Shinka Evolve framework that combines LLMs with evolutionary algorithms for open-ended program search.

Robert Lange, founding researcher at Sakana AI, joins Tim to discuss *Shinka Evolve* — a framework that combines LLMs with evolutionary algorithms to do open-ended program search. The core claim: systems like AlphaEvolve can optimize solutions to fixed problems, but real scientific progress requires co-evolving the problems themselves. GTC is coming, the premier AI conference, great opportunity to learn about AI. NVIDIA and partners will showcase breakthroughs in physical AI, AI factories, agentic AI, and inference, exploring the next wave of AI innovation for developers and researchers. Register for virtual GTC for free, using my link and win NVIDIA DGX Spark (https://nvda.ws/4qQ0LMg) • Why AlphaEvolve gets stuck — it needs a human to hand it the right problem. Shinka tries to invent new problems automatically, drawing on ideas from POET, PowerPlay, and MAP-Elites quality-diversity search. • The *architecture* of Shinka: an archive of programs organized as islands, LLMs used as mutation operators, and a UCB bandit that adaptively selects between frontier models (GPT-5, Sonnet 4.5, Gemini) mid-run. The credit-assignment problem across models turns out to be genuinely hard. •…

People in this episode

Host: Tim

Guest: Robert Lange

Topics covered

• AI frameworks
• evolutionary algorithms
• open-ended program search
• scientific progress
• machine learning
• competitive programming
• AI innovation

Keywords

• Shinka Evolve
• AlphaEvolve
• evolutionary algorithms
• program search
• AI frameworks
• machine learning
• competitive programming
• GTC
• NVIDIA

Sponsors

NVIDIA

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Sakana AI, NVIDIA, AlphaEvolve, POET, PowerPlay, MAP-Elites, GTC

Products: GPT-5, Sonnet 4.5, Gemini

Books & works: Shinka Evolve

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