So I think the GitHub user logannye is most likely a real master's student at CMU, but that doesn't mean he isn't also mass-producing papers of questionable validity with AI.

I gave a diagonal reading, it uses the right jargon somehow. They add some new components to the Einstein-Hilbert action they say originate from quantum complexity contributions, to be honest seems completely random, but i'm not an expert. Especially the conclusions look like they have been written with AI.

The 10 citations are almost all self-citing: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2388097775195172652...

He's a real person. His TedX talk is about applying AI medicine. Now medicine has so far been one of the least useful ways of applying LLMs/AI but even in areas where its been effective, it's problem is no one is that much of expert 'cause the AI is doing the "thinking" (prompt-"engineering" isn't nothing, it just isn't that hard to pick-up and has to be constantly changing and simplifying as the models improve).

And the thing about his "amazing" output is that it has all the ear-marks of someone who lightly editing "brilliant" LLM hallucinations. Just the case of Quantum Extensions to the Einstein Field Equations; this is either going to be big advance with thousands of citations or it will bogus (and paid placement - that's negative credibility, less credible than just an bare ArchiveX upload).

So, sure he's real. His claims, on the other hand...

Edit: And the thing about the stream of "genius" ideas is that LLMs seem to be inspiring many people with the approach of bouncing ideas off the chat-thing, having the chat-thing fill the ideas with seemingly plausible phrases and math (most of which makes sense) and reach the point where they seem to have created an earth shattering advance - especially in fields they didn't know in any depth. Notably, cranks have been common in many fields already but this allows cranks to proceed without the former markers of crankdom. And that presents some challenges to a variety of fields.

Eg suppose you have one system that lets you verify 'this person has X dollars in their bank account' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Honduras' and another system that lets you verify 'this person has a passport of Germany', then whether the authors of these three systems ever intended to or not, you can prove a statement like 'this person has a prime number amount of dollars and has a passport from either Honduras or Germany'.

I see the big application not in building a union. For that you'd want something like Off-The-Record messaging probably? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messaging

Where I see the big application is in compliance, especially implementing know-your-customer rules, while preserving privacy. So with a system outlined as above, a bank can store a proof that the customer comes from one of the approved countries (ie not North Korea or Russia etc) without having to store an actual copy of the customer's passport or ever even learning where the customer is from.

As you mentioned, for this to work you need to have an 'anchor' to the real world. What ZKP gives you is a way to weave a net between these anchors.

As I understand it, you can do arbitrary computations on https responses and prove that you didn't tamper with the response or the computation.