Free Energy Universality of Spherical Spin Glasses

We prove the free energy and ground state energy of spherical spin glasses are universal under the minimal moment assumptions. Previously such universality was known only for Ising spin glasses and random symmetric matrices, the latter being a celebrated result of Bai–Yin. Our methods extend to ${\mathrm{\ell }}^q$ balls for $q>2$, thus resolving a conjecture of Chen-Sen, and to tensor PCA.