On the other hand, real world performance is really the only useful metric for matrix multiplication. I don’t really care about the theoretical performance, or the number of operations. Not disagreeing with your take that the claim is grandiose, just pointing out that finding a generalizable way to automate the improvement of what is almost certainly the most important mathematical operation a computer can do is worth some attention. It also suggests other mathematical operations could be improved this way as well - potentially algorithms that haven’t gotten as much theoretical or practical attention as matrix multiplication. With all that said, they even point out that other people have worked on this before using other optimization strategies. I’d guess they got into Nature either by using the Deepmind name, because Nature really loves reinforcement learning because it’s a cool topic that draws views, or because they’re the first group to find their algorithm leads to real improvements. (Probably a mixture of all three, I’d guess)