🤖 Weekly commentary: The machine that builds itself

Wow.

Wow. DeepMind announced AlphaTensor, a neural network which has unlocked novel mathematical algorithms. Using an extension to AlphaZero (its general games playing engine), AlphaTensor has improved a key piece of fundamental mathematics: matrix multiplication. 

Wow. I said that before, yes. The real wow is that matrix multiplication is the heart of modern deep learning. A typical neural network will conduct billions, trillions of such multiplications. In fact, the demand for matrix multiplications has increased polynomially in the past decade (and one reason why graphics processing units have taken off as the table computing system for AI.)

Wow. Here is why it matters.