Elixir v1.20.0-rc.5 is out with our latest batch of typing and performance improvements. We are really close to the final release, so please give it a try and report what you find! https://t.co/8dWT2KdA5h
AGI has been achieved in Ireland.
Artificial Guinness Intelligence.
Engineer Matt Cortland built an AI voice agent named Rachel, gave her a Northern Irish accent, and pointed her at every pub in the country.
Over St. Paddy's weekend, she rang 3,000+ of them to ask one question: how much for a pint of Guinness?
How he built it: ElevenLabs for the voice, Twilio and an old Irish SIM to place the calls, Google Places API to map 5,200+ pubs across all 32 counties, and Claude to parse the transcripts for prices.
2,052 picked up. Barely any even realized she was AI. The whole operation ran him about €200.
The result is a live price index he's calling the Guinndex.
Ireland's statistics office used to track pint prices, but stopped in 2011.
An engineer with a weekend and a voice agent just picked up where they left off.
Been hacking on an Elixir port of @karpathy's autoresearch — an LLM agent that designs and trains GPT models autonomously, overnight. Turns out the BEAM is (unsurprisingly) a natural fit: hot code reloading for experiments, multi-GPU fault tolerance, LiveView to watch it think.
Here is my take on why Elixir is the best language for AI: immutability, documentation, stability, and tooling for coding agents.
It builds on the recent study in which Elixir had the highest completion rate across models among 20 different languages.
Link in the thread below.
Spoke tonight at @BelfastElixir hosted in the wonderful new Enzai offices on Ax Framework for building Agents and MCP servers in #elixirlang diving into why elixir is beyond perfect as a platform and language for this kind of work - also previewed the otel compliant Agent observably platform I’ve got in the works
@evadne IMO there are many ways to skin this cat already and almost infinitely without the unnecessary contextual processing and degradation that comes with it in current edge models - think tree data structures, files and the rest is personal preference and agentic loops
Elixir Learners, the new version of the Elixir Language Tour is up!
The tour is an interactive guide to Elixir, running fully in your browser thanks to Popcorn 🍿
Check out the video for details 👇
Try it out: https://t.co/Cnxz09Y3Pr
Survival of the fittest code.
Core War (1984) is a game where programs must crash their opponents to survive. Warriors written in an assembly language called Redcode fight for control of a virtual machine.
Our new paper: Digital Red Queen: Adversarial Program Evolution in Core War with LLMs, explores what happens when LLMs drive an adversarial evolutionary arms race in this domain.
We task LLMs to write Warrior programs in Redcode that must out-compete a virtual world full of such programs. Core War is a Turing-complete environment where code and data share the same address space, which leads to some very chaotic self-modifying code dynamics.
This approach is inspired by the Red Queen hypothesis in evolutionary biology: the principle that species must continually adapt and evolve simply to survive against ever changing competitors. In our work, programs continuously adapt to defeat a growing history of opponents rather than a static benchmark.
We find that this adversarial process leads to the emergence of increasingly general strategies, including targeted self-replication, data bombing, and massive multithreading. Most intriguingly, it reveals a form of convergent evolution. Different code implementations settle into similar high performing behaviors, mirroring how biological agents independently evolve similar traits to solve the same problems.
I think this work positions Core War as a sandbox for studying Red Queen dynamics in artificial systems. It offers a safe controlled environment for analyzing how AI agents might evolve in real world adversarial settings such as cybersecurity.
By simulating these adversarial dynamics in an isolated sandbox, we offer a glimpse into the future where deployed LLM systems may start competing against one another for limited resources in the real world.
Your family shouldn't have to dig through accounts and guess at passwords during the worst week of their lives. Killswitch handles it automatically. Set it up once, then just tap a link to check in—no login required. Looking for beta testers. It's stable, launching end of January. Early testers get a discount code. https://t.co/p6QVReF3kX #myelixirstatus
No dude, I just vibe'd it out in the small hours kicking the tyres of #tidewave w/ Claude Code - I've literally not even looked at the code!
The project has a wild name too 😅 as I only init the repo as a quick test when trying to debug the MCP connection between Tidewave + cc that turned out to be an issue in bandit that @josevalim patched helping me out (https://t.co/O8yuMqP0c5) and is in v1.10.1 already shipped.
Happy to fire it up on gh if you want.