Back in the elden days, I took a course called "Large Scale Scientific Computing". It was mostly about multiplying large matrices. I didn't think this was going to be remotely applicable to anything commercial.
Ah ... the temptation of the optimizer. It's such a simple algorithm, it has far more impact on back-propagation calculations than ... the actual backprop calculation, never mind details like model architecture. So tempting to work on it.
But so very, very, very, very hard to make progress on it. Even at PhD level. Just don't try ...
Only read the first section but this sounds really impressive -- up to 50% of up to 17% of training time when using the Muon optimiser, so up to around 7% of basically pure improvement with no downside.
