Fractal Launches PiEvolve, an Evolutionary Agentic Engine for Autonomous Machine Learning and Scientific Discovery

Ranks among the top-performing agents on OpenAI's MLE-Bench and sets new performance milestones

NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Fractal (www.fractal.ai), a publicly listed global enterprise AI company serving Fortune 500® organizations, today announced the launch of PiEvolve, an evolutionary, agentic engine designed for autonomous machine learning and scientific discovery.

PiEvolve by Fractal ranks among the top-performing agents on OpenAI's MLE-Bench, a benchmark that evaluates how effectively AI systems can solve real-world machine learning challenges. It is the first evaluated agent to surpass 60 percent in Overall Medal Rate and 80 percent in MLE-Bench-Lite performance, crossing thresholds widely viewed as significant milestones in autonomous machine learning. These results mark a meaningful advance in agentic AI capability.

PiEvolve also combines strong performance with efficiency. Within a standard 24-hour run, it delivers results comparable to systems that require longer runtimes and greater compute. Even after 12 hours, it ranks among the top-performing agents, identifying high-quality solutions early.

Unlike traditional machine learning models that are trained once and then deployed, PiEvolve continuously tests and improves its own solutions until the available compute budget is fully utilized. Built on a graph-structured search architecture, it integrates reasoning, code generation, and validation within a unified iterative process. This enables it to tackle complex, multi-variable optimization problems across supply chains, financial services, and data center operations, where static AI systems often struggle to perform at scale.

"MLE-Bench is widely regarded as the gold standard for evaluating AI agents on real-world machine learning tasks," said Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder, Group Chief Executive and Vice Chairman, Fractal. "PiEvolve's ranking among the top systems globally is a meaningful validation of our research direction. At Fractal, our ambition has always been to power every human decision in the enterprise. PiEvolve advances that mission by enabling AI systems that continuously improve and deliver measurable business outcomes."

Key features of PiEvolve include:

• Continuous Optimization: Iteratively evolves candidate solutions, improving performance until computational limits are reached.
• Intelligent Memory: Uses priority-based sampling with decay to avoid local optima and ensure diverse exploration of solution paths.
• Dual Strategy: Improves high-performing solutions while actively debugging weaker ones to elevate overall system performance.
• Production-Ready: Includes Pause and Resume capabilities for long-running workloads and integrates seamlessly into enterprise ML pipelines.
• Graph-Structured Search: Systematically explores reasoning, code, and validation loops to generate and refine solutions.

"PiEvolve ranks among the top agents evaluated on OpenAI's MLE-Bench, including systems developed by leading global research labs. Achieving top-tier performance on OpenAI's MLE-Bench is a significant milestone for our research team and reinforces Fractal's commitment to advancing enterprise-grade AI," said Suraj Amonkar, Chief AI Research and Platforms Officer at Fractal. "We are building autonomous systems capable of sustained reasoning, self-improvement, and evolutionary learning, bringing next-generation agentic intelligence to real-world machine learning challenges."

With the launch of PiEvolve, Fractal reinforces its position at the forefront of enterprise AI innovation. PiEvolve brings continuous improvement, efficiency, and production reliability together in a single system, helping organizations solve complex challenges with confidence and scale. For more information, visit https://fractal.ai/ai-research/pi-evolve

About Fractal

Fractal (NSE: FRACTAL) is a publicly listed global enterprise AI company with a vision to power every human decision in the enterprise.

Fractal's suite of businesses includes Asper.ai (enabling interconnected decisions for revenue growth) and Analytics Vidhya (among the world's largest data science communities). Fractal spun out Qure.ai, a global healthcare AI leader enhancing the rapid identification and management of tuberculosis, lung cancer, and stroke. Fractal's dedicated AI Research team is focused on foundational AI advancements, including knowledge-based foundational models, reasoning-based systems, and agentic systems. The team has launched successful products, including MarshallGoldsmith.ai, Vaidya.ai, Kalaido.ai, and the open-source reasoning model Fathom-R1-14B and tool-based reasoning model Fathom-DeepResearch.

Fractal employs over 5,000 professionals across global locations, including the United States, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Ukraine, India, Singapore, South Africa, the UAE, and Australia. It has consistently earned recognition as one of India's Best Companies to Work For (Top 100, 2025), a 'Great Workplace' for eight consecutive years, and as one of 'India's Best Workplaces for Women' for five years running by the Great Place to Work® Institute. Fractal was also named a Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave™ for Customer Analytics Service Providers and earned leadership positions in the Everest Group Peak Matrix Assessment 2025 for AI and Analytics Services, and Information Services Group's 2024 assessments for Data Engineering and Data Science Services.

 

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

Fractal Launches PiEvolve, an Evolutionary Agentic Engine for Autonomous Machine Learning and Scientific Discovery

Fractal Launches PiEvolve, an Evolutionary Agentic Engine for Autonomous Machine Learning and Scientific Discovery

Bold curriculum update empowers children to think critically, act responsibly and shape, not just consume, technology

CAMBRIDGE, England, Feb. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As digital literacy moves to the forefront of education reforms worldwide, the International Education group at Cambridge University Press & Assessment (Cambridge) today announces a major transformation of its Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary Digital Literacy curricula, redefining what it means for young people to thrive in an AI-powered world.

Designed for learners aged 5–14, the updated Cambridge Primary Digital Literacy and Lower Secondary Digital Literacy go beyond teaching children how to use technology. They foster digital maturity, equipping students with the judgement, critical thinking and confidence to decide why, when and how technology should be used.

The refreshed curricula provide schools with a clear, future-facing framework that empowers learners to retain agency in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. New content ranges from online wellbeing to prioritising human intelligence in the age of AI while exploring the challenges and the value that AI can bring to their lives and education. Focus shifts from mastering individual tools to building adaptable, transferable skills to enable learners not only to navigate misinformation and online harms, but to actively shape the technologies influencing their education and their futures.

What's new?

The updated curriculum explores how AI can support multimodal communication across different audiences and platforms, and how structured dialogue with AI systems can deepen research, inquiry and critical thinking. At the same time, it strengthens media literacy and reinforces students' ownership and understanding of their work.

New and updated topics in the curricula include:

• Online safety and cyberbullying – protection of physical and emotional wellbeing
• Community building and collaboration – using digital and AI tools
• Source-reliability and echo chambers – evaluation of AI-sourced information
• Personal responsibility while embracing digital and AI tools
• Human and artificial intelligence – how to differentiate and when to use
• Parasocial and digital relationships – understanding their personal impact
• Creation of learning outputs while remaining the primary author – such as reports and presentations
• Future-ready learners – evaluating the technology of the future

Learning in today's digital world

Curriculum author Beverly Clarke MBE said: "It is essential that educators across all subject areas support young learners to think deeply and critically about AI and their relationship to it. This revised Cambridge curriculum supports schools to engage with AI in a positive, proactive and informed way, embedding age-appropriate content that empowers learners to develop confidence, curiosity and critical thinking as they navigate an increasingly AI-enabled world."

Nadja Djordjevic, Digital Literacy Teacher at Savremena osnovna škola, Belgrade, Serbia, was given a first look at the refreshed Lower Secondary curriculum. She said: "I especially appreciate the inclusion of risks such as increased plagiarism due to AI development, and the emphasis on personal ethics for both creators and AI engineers. I see this value as crucial within the creative world – it helps position AI as a supportive tool and at the same time preserve human authenticity and expression."

Teaching and assessing

Schools can teach Digital Literacy as a separate subject or embed the content within other subjects, depending on approach and timetabling. For example, schools could compare the value of thinking and working mathematically against cognitive offloading to AI.

There is no formal assessment of the curricula. Learners receive formative feedback through discussion and observation. It is vital that learners demonstrate ownership and understanding of the work that they produce, particularly where AI has been used.

The curricula are free of charge to registered schools that offer Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary and are ready for teaching immediately. For more information, visit the Cambridge Primary Digital Literacy and Lower Secondary Digital Literacy pages on the Cambridge website. 

** The press release content is from PR Newswire. Bastille Post is not involved in its creation. **

Cambridge drives a new era of digital maturity for the age of AI