Comment by svat

- The author is already the world's best expert on this topic.

- You're right that it's possible Fable came up with a different o(n log n) algorithm that is not in OpenAI's paper, but (apart from being unlikely) it doesn't matter, as he talks of the belief that “the main result is possibly correct”, not necessarily that OpenAI's paper is: whether the argument comes from the paper or from Fable, the question of interest is whether multiplication is really possible in o(n log n) time. The point is that there's a genuine idea here, somewhere between OpenAI's paper and Fable's explanation of it and the author's understanding of it.

- This is in fact how mathematicians have evaluated papers for decades: is there any way this result could be true? Is there an actual idea here that could help? Do I understand enough of the argument to be convinced it's likely true, modulo some details that need to be filled in? The last step (actually filling in the details) happens when teaching it to someone else or writing it again in one's own words.