@highergeometer@mathstodon.xyz
Post #3030769
2025-05-14 21:25 UTC
Replies (1)
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@tao@mathstodon.xyz 2025-05-15 15:22
@highergeometer@mathstodon.xyz I was not involved with the matrix multiplication results mentioned in the broader announcement (my collaboration basically comprises Section 3.2 of the white paper). My best guess is that the statement of the results got oversimplified at some point between the actual generation of the result and the release of the white paper. (Unlike an academic collaboration with a small number of authors, the papers at Deepmind go through multiple layers of review by different sets of people, including some tasked with simplifying the exposition but who are not domain experts in the field.) From context, I believe Deepmind was implicitly restricting attention to those matrix multiplication methods that can be iterated to give a Strassen-type algorithm for large matrices. Not all representations of, say 5 x 5 matrix multiplication, are suitable for this task, for instance those that rely on the commutativity of the entries cannot be directly inserted into Strassen's method.