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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 16, 2026 · UTC

Some aspects of AI development resemble a population process in which models are specialised, retrained on the output of peers, or combined by averaging weights. These practices lead to generations of models, in the biological sense studied by population genetics. Here, I develop this parallelism and interpret multigenerational model populations in terms of sexual and asexual reproduction, formally recombining the two fields. I test these analogies in an exact inheritance model, in trained networks (recurrent, feedforward and variational autoencoder generators) and in large language models, an

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