Evolution through large models

The evolution of sex for artificial intelligence: a population-genetic framework for multigenerational model populations

The paper draws a parallel between AI model development and population genetics, treating successive model generations as analogous to sexual and asexual reproduction. It demonstrates that training models on peers’ outputs reproduces classic genetic processes such as the Wright–Fisher model, while combining parents’ weights can either cancel or preserve inherited advantages depending on the method. Experiments across recurrent, feedforward, and language models confirm these analogies and reveal architecture‑specific biases, including the Fisher‑Muller effect and reproductive isolation when lineages learn conflicting conventions.

State of Open Models: Summer 2026 Observations

Emergence via Phase Transitions: Mechanism Landscapes and Universal Convergence Across Complex Systems

arXiv:2606. 07563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Across machine learning, biology, and physics, independently evolving systems often converge toward strikingly similar high-level structures despite radically different microscopic details.

Towards Diverse Scientific Hypothesis Search with Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 10587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are on the rise for accelerating scientific discovery, most recently in advanced tasks such as generating valid scientific hypotheses.

Flawed in Nature, Perfect through Evolution

arXiv:2609.00129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models degrades when the problem they were trained on drifts. This is a nea...

Poor Man's Agentic Modeling: Simulating Large LLM-Agent Societies on a Laptop

arXiv:2608. 11215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulating societies of many large language model (LLM) agents is expensive, yet the questions asked of such simulations are usually macroscopic: phase behaviour, stylised facts, and scaling with the number of agents $N$, not the cognition of any single agent.