Yeah, they work by turning the problem into some crazy kind of group theory and attacking it that way. Every once in a while someone shaves the decimal down slightly, just by implementing the deep math in a more efficient way. A new approach will be needed if it is in fact possible to get down to O(n^2^), though. Strassen’s is a divide and conquer algorithm, and each step of the iteration looks like this:
In my copy of Introduction to Algorithms, it says something like “this is the most bullshit algorithm in the book and it’s not close” underneath. You can make it a bit neater by representing the multiplication operation as a 3-dimensional tensor, but at the end of the day it’s still just a stupid arithmetic trick. One that’s built into your GPU.