Is GNFS quasi-polynomial-time?

Question

Wikipedia states that the time complexity of the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS) is $$\exp\left( \left(\sqrt[3]{\frac{64}{9}} + o(1)\right)(\log N)^{\frac{1}{3}}(\log \log N)^{\frac{2}{3}}\right),$$ where $N$ is the number to be factored.

The same site also mentions that quasi-polynomial time is $$\mbox{QP} = \bigcup_{c \in \mathbb{N}} \mbox{DTIME} \left(2^{\log^c n}\right),$$ where $n$ is the length of the input, in other words, $n=\log N$.

Now my question is whether GNFS is quasi-polynomial-time. It appears not, because of the existence of the $(\log N)^{1/3}$ exponent.

How about sub-exponential? Wikipedia says $$\text{SUBEXP}=\bigcap_{\varepsilon>0} \text{DTIME}\left(2^{n^\varepsilon}\right).$$ I think the answer is still negative, because $\varepsilon=1/3$ in this case and it can’t be smaller as the intersection requires.

So the running time is exponential. Am I right?

Update

In the table of contents of the book Prime Numbers: A Computational Perspective, NFS and Quadratic Sieve (QS) are both listed in Chapter 6 Subexponential Factoring Algorithms.

Answer 1

Using the same variable $n$ to mean two different things in two places is confusing. In the context of your question, I think it is better to describe the running time of GNFS as $$\exp\left( (c+o(1)) \, n^{\frac{1}{3}}(\log n)^{\frac{2}{3}}\right),$$ where $n$ is the number of bits in the number being factored, and $c$ is a constant.

With this formulation, it is clear that it is not in QP ($n^{1/3}$ is not in $O(\log^c n)$ for any $c$), and not in SUBEXP ($n^{1/3}$ is not in $O(n^{\varepsilon})$ when $0<\varepsilon<1/3$). Yet as Wikipedia explains, there are multiple different definitions of sub-exponential; by some of them, GNFS runs in sub-exponential time, and by others, it does not. See also Are there subexponential-time algorithms for NP-complete problems?.