It would be better if it came from AI, as it would show that AI will be able to make helpful improvements to technology.
AI has come up with impartments to other algorithms, such as matrix multiplication, so it's not super farfetched for it to come up with something similar to this, especially with all the improvements to AI lately.
I told it is was possible, the worst case runtime characteristics and asked it to figure out how you would achieve it. I also gave it some hints from the paper.
Edit: gpt4, Gemini 2 and Claude had no luck. Human driven computer science is still safe.