Strassen has _not_ stood as the fastest way, whether you look at the exponent or the constant factor.

It's probably more accurate to say Strassen was the first in a series of complexity improvements to matrix multiplication, most of whom are theoretical curiosities and have prohibitively high constant factors preventing them from ever been used in practice.

Even if all you cared about was the exponent, Strassen was beaten decades ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication#Computat...