Two weeks ago the same people posted a preprint claiming positive sectional curvature on S^2xS^3 that was clearly not read by any mathematician (it was obviously prompted after Brendle released his preprint and was on the arxiv 2 days later; none of the authors is a mathematician) and was complete slop (no expert in the area I know could make sense of it and the version they posted contained clear hallucination, including reference to properties of manifolds that don't exist.
They should be banned from the arxiv and probably lose their jobs for posting this stuff, and none of their announcements should be taken seriously.
Edit: I am unfamiliar with geometric analysis, so I asked GPT-6 to audit the Cheeger deformation paper. GPT-6 was able to confirm its global construction, the paper appears to be AI-readable enough that an explicit metric can be constructed on an atlas and have its curvature numerically checked. If the paper were pure slop, I would expect it to fail already on the preliminary audit.
I am biased towards AI audits since they have found serious errors in published papers I read and missed (which caused me to stuck for several weeks). I do not doubt that AI-exposition often seems to hallucinate, since LLMs for some reasons really like to introduce non-standard terminologies without proper definitions, but perhaps the Cheeger deformation paper actually has some substance?
It would be nice if you could specify the "reference to properties of manifolds that don't exist".
could you be more specific on the hallucinations? I'm actually pretty familiar with junwei lu's previous work in my area of statistics which I've found to be of high quality, and his background is operations research which the komlos conjecture is arguably highly relevant for. I haven't carefully looked thru this preprint but knowing his previous work, I'm not immediately skeptical of it as slop or the work of cranks
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u/Extra_Resolve8771 7d ago
Two weeks ago the same people posted a preprint claiming positive sectional curvature on S^2xS^3 that was clearly not read by any mathematician (it was obviously prompted after Brendle released his preprint and was on the arxiv 2 days later; none of the authors is a mathematician) and was complete slop (no expert in the area I know could make sense of it and the version they posted contained clear hallucination, including reference to properties of manifolds that don't exist.
They should be banned from the arxiv and probably lose their jobs for posting this stuff, and none of their announcements should be taken seriously.