Launching a new kernel competition: Linear Algebra Kernels For The Age Of Research.
First problem: batched QR decomposition on B200. Old math, modern hardware.
Prize: Rare swag and hangout in SF
I have some mixed feelings about this result:
On the one hand, it's genuinely impressive. I didn't know that Shampoo could be configured to perform this well on the benchmark.
On the other hand, the way this performance boost was achieved seems difficult to call "Vanilla," for the following reason:
According to @_arohan_, the boost depends upon fixing a numerical linear algebra issue that he observed to occur in my initial standard DistributedShampoo run. He fixed the issue by enabling the flag rank_deficient_stability_config=PseudoInverseConfig().
Here's the problem: This is an undocumented flag. It is contained within the 12,000-line DistributedShampoo codebase, but it does not appear in any user-facing documentation.
As a result, if someone tries to train a model using DistributedShampoo without either (a) knowing about this special undocumented flag or (b) being prepared to detect and fix the numerical linear algebra issues that may occur without it, then they won't be able to achieve @_arohan_'s level of Shampoo performance. This level of effort would be considered atypical for mere hyperparameter tuning.
-- [Note on Muon baseline in plot below: Rohan's post compared Shampoo to a slightly undertuned Muon baseline from 2026/05/01, which reached the target loss in 3375 steps. This resulted in a 50-step gap between Shampoo and Muon. In the figure below I'm using the up-to-date 2026/05/03 baseline, which reaches the target in 3325 steps. This results in the step-counts exactly matching between Muon and the tuned/stabilized Shampoo variant.]
