When people rush to replicate an experiment, everybody with a positive result has something to publish very quickly, and everybody with a negative result need a lot more time to be certain of it.
The kinds of results we are seeing are very hard to get by chance or due to bad experimental setup. But as a rule, we can't really differentiate a real thing from random noise in as little time as have passed.
How is that possibly true? LK-99 is already amongst the highest-temperature superconductors ever found (with that claim substantiated by at least two independent research teams as of this moment).
But, for what it's worth, as both an LK-99 optimist and as someone who has worked in the field and who still talks to people in it, most people in it seem to put the chances well below 50%.
If you push it, all the diamagnetism videos people published about reproducing it could be created by some weird and unlikely distribution of ferromagnetism on the sample. Except for the one that nobody knows where it comes from, that could easily be a fabrication.
That leaves the original, that is clearly diamagnetism, but still could be misleading in many ways.
We don't know how many labs are working on replicating this. So we have no idea how unlikely mistakes we should expect to see.
But that people have a positive result at all to publish is extraordinary. If this isn't a super conductor at this point that is probably even bigger than a superconductor - it means there is other physics we are not aware of to investigate.
At this point I've changed to this is probably true, but I don't know how big it is. (if it is true but impossible to produce at industrial scale it is not revolutionary)
When people rush to replicate an experiment, everybody with a positive result has something to publish very quickly, and everybody with a negative result need a lot more time to be certain of it.
The kinds of results we are seeing are very hard to get by chance or due to bad experimental setup. But as a rule, we can't really differentiate a real thing from random noise in as little time as have passed.