Comment by varunneal
9 hours ago
Muon was invented by Keller Jordan (and then optimized by others) for the sake of this speedrunning competition. Even though it was invented less than a year ago, it has already been widely adopted as SOTA for model training
This is the common belief but not quite correct! The Muon update was proposed by Bernstein as the result of a theoretical paper suggesting concrete realizations of the theory, and Keller implemented it and added practical things to get it to work well (input/output AdamW, aggressive coefficients, post-Nesterov, etc).
Both share equal credit I feel (also, the paper's co-authors!), both put in a lot of hard work for it, though I tend to bring up Bernstein since he tends to be pretty quiet about it himself.
(Source: am experienced speedrunner who's been in these circles for a decent amount of time)
sharing some useful resrources for learning Muon (since I'm also just catching up on it)
- https://x.com/leloykun/status/1846842883967692926
- https://www.yacinemahdid.com/p/muon-optimizer-explained-to-a...