Sakana AI's AC/DC: 8 small LLMs beat a 72B model by coevolving with their own tasks

AC/DC coevolves a population of LLMs with an archive of AI-generated tasks. A task force of 8 small evolved models beats a 72B baseline and closes the GPT-4o best-of-N gap from -3.17 to -1.02. Sakana's new ICLR 2026 paper argues collective intelligence beats monolithic scaling.