Yeah, the record has stood for "FIFTY-SIX YEARS" if you don't count all the times the record has been beaten since then. Indeed, "countless brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have worked on this problem for over half a century without success" if you don't count all the successes that have happened since then. The really annoying part about all this is that the original announcement didn't have to lie: if you look at just 4x4 matrices, you could say there technically hasn't been an improvement since Strassen's algorithm. Wow! It's really funny how these promptfans ignore all the enormous number of human achievements in an area when they decide to comment about how AI is totally gonna beat humans there.
How much does this actually improve upon Strassen's algorithm? The matrix multiplication exponent given by Strassen's algorithm is log~4~(49) (i.e. log~2~(7)), and this result would improve it to log~4~(48). In other words, it improves from 2.81 to 2.79. Truly revolutionary, AGI is gonna make mathematicians obsolete now. Ignore the handy dandy Wikipedia chart which shows that this exponent was ... beaten in 1979.
I know far less about how matrix multiplication is done in practice, but from what I've seen, even Strassen's algorithm isn't useful in applications because memory locality and parallelism are far more important. This AlphaEvolve result would represent a far smaller improvement (and I hope you enjoy the pain of dealing with a 4x4 block matrix instead of 2x2). If anyone does have knowledge about how this works, I'd be interested to know.
I know r/singularity is like shooting fish in a barrel but it really pissed me off seeing them misinterpret the significance of a result in matrix multiplication: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont_think_people_realize_just_how_insane_the/
Yeah, the record has stood for "FIFTY-SIX YEARS" if you don't count all the times the record has been beaten since then. Indeed, "countless brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have worked on this problem for over half a century without success" if you don't count all the successes that have happened since then. The really annoying part about all this is that the original announcement didn't have to lie: if you look at just 4x4 matrices, you could say there technically hasn't been an improvement since Strassen's algorithm. Wow! It's really funny how these promptfans ignore all the enormous number of human achievements in an area when they decide to comment about how AI is totally gonna beat humans there.
How much does this actually improve upon Strassen's algorithm? The matrix multiplication exponent given by Strassen's algorithm is log~4~(49) (i.e. log~2~(7)), and this result would improve it to log~4~(48). In other words, it improves from 2.81 to 2.79. Truly revolutionary, AGI is gonna make mathematicians obsolete now. Ignore the handy dandy Wikipedia chart which shows that this exponent was ... beaten in 1979.
I know far less about how matrix multiplication is done in practice, but from what I've seen, even Strassen's algorithm isn't useful in applications because memory locality and parallelism are far more important. This AlphaEvolve result would represent a far smaller improvement (and I hope you enjoy the pain of dealing with a 4x4 block matrix instead of 2x2). If anyone does have knowledge about how this works, I'd be interested to know.