Up until now, it was recognized that a detailed study of the p-rank in towers of function fields is relevant for their applications in coding theory and cryptography. In particular, it appears that having a large p-rank may be a barrier for a tower to lead to competitive bounds for the symmetric tensor rank of multiplication in every extension of the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ , with q a power of p. In this paper, we show that there are two exceptional cases, namely the extensions of $\mathbb{F}_2$ and $\mathbb{F}_3$. In particular, using the definition field descent on the field with 2 or 3 elements of a Garcia–Stichtenoth tower of algebraic function fields which is asymptotically optimal in the sense of Drinfel'd–Vlăduţ and has maximal Hasse–Witt invariant, we obtain a significant improvement of the uniform bounds for the symmetric tensor rank of multiplication in any extension of $\mathbb{F}_2$ and $\mathbb{F}_3$.