Matei Zaharia to lecture on accelerating research with AI at Simons Institute
matei_zaharia · x · 2026-11-08
UC Berkeley professor and Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia will give a public lecture at the Simons Institute (Nov 19, 2026) on accelerating research and engineering with AI.
Key points:
- LLMs are increasingly used to speed up research and engineering, succeeding in programming and math and expanding into biology, chemistry, and beyond.
- He'll cover AI search algorithms like GEPA, AlphaEvolve, and AdaEvolve and results in CS, biology, and other fields.
- Core thesis: AI works well when solutions are easy to verify but struggles when they aren't (e.g., chemistry and biology, where experiments take days) — though progress is being made in translating more problems into the easy-to-verify setting.
- He'll also speculate on a future with highly effective, tireless AI coworkers exploring solutions for us.
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