Talagrand's operator cotype problem (Talagrand 2021) concerns a bounded operator between Banach spaces.
Its Gaussian cotype-
and Rademacher cotype-
are the least constants for which
|
(1)
| |||
|
(2)
|
where
denotes the expectation value, the
are independent standard Gaussian random
variables, and the
are independent Rademacher random
variables. The
-summing norm
is the least constant for which
|
(3)
|
Talagrand asked whether there is a universal constant such that
.
Wu (2026) constructed counterexamples already for , with
|
(4)
|
for an absolute constant .
Wu (2026) credits ChatGPT GPT-5.6 with discovering the counterexample and reports
checking the proof. As of Sep. 22, 2026, independent specialist review had not
been reported.