The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-ono-carina-hong-axiom-startup-649bc417

by pondsider • 8 months ago

32 37 8 months ago

srean• 8 months ago

Interesting, seems wsj does not allow archive.is through their paywall

TrackerFF• 8 months ago

Honestly I can't fault people of joining the gold rush, while it is still red hot. Generational amounts of money is being made in a very short time.

abirch• 8 months ago

I agree with you. Even if this start up fails, it's not like he can't return to academia.

drweevil• 8 months ago

Yes. It is a mistake to ignore the effects that the massive amounts of money are having, in any analysis of this sector. It’s the number 1 factor at this point, eclipsing reason and societal needs. “Gold rush” is an apt analogy.

jandrese• 8 months ago

I wonder if this is like when Thinking Machines Corporation hired Richard Feynman mostly to get a little clout. They didn't have a lot for him to do, and he thought they were a bunch of naive kids with an idea that would never work in the real world but had a fat pocketbook. In the end he was able to mathematically prove that they could safely do a hardware optimization, but they didn't believe him and tried to overprovision instead, but late in the design they ran short of transistors and had to trust his math. It worked, but the machine was still mostly useless even when it did work properly.

stevenalowe• 8 months ago

The commercial problem with Thinking Machines was that they had to ship a programmer with every one sold because almost no one knew how to program a SIMD machine in Occam

nathan_douglas• 8 months ago

No wonder Dennis Nedry was so aggrieved...

zem• 8 months ago

the full article as a lot more context, including the fact that he reached out to Hong to join her startup rather than vice versa. he seems to be excited about the problem they're attacking and has a good idea of what he can do with a "founding mathematician" title, coming up with problems that will guide their research.

masfuerte• 8 months ago

For anyone else who can't see the article:

University of Virginia professor Ken Ono, one of the world's most prominent mathematicians, joins AI startup Axiom Math, which is building an “AI mathematician”

dctoedt3• 8 months ago

Gift article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-ono-carina-hong-axiom-s...

terrycody• 8 months ago

May I ask how you did this?

dctoedt3• 8 months ago

Unlocked gift article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-ono-carina-hong-axiom-s...

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

Any predictions on When the rizz and swagger of AI wears off and gets replaced by the next fad?

impossiblefork5• 8 months ago

I have no idea what he's planning to do, but this kind of thing just now becoming feasible.

I get the impression doing something like the title is a dream of many Chinese AI researchers, and why we [edit:see] them focusing on things like the mathematics competition datasets. I am slightly in this direction myself.

OutOfHere3• 8 months ago

I could review his published research, but in the interim, I had GPT painstakingly review the math in the image, and extrapolate the direction, which it considered to be a suggested hybrid successor to the Transformer for structured and scientific domains: https://chatgpt.com/share/6931c915-88c8-8012-9ca4-b0097e53e8...

impossiblefork5• 8 months ago

I don't think that's correct.

lambdas2• 8 months ago

Yeah, that’s not right. I’m not sure about painstakingly… it said it couldn’t make out the notation, and spat out what it thought it could read, and you never checked it - nor read the articles for context, just assumed it was to do directly with further AI work.

It picked up on the polynomial, then what it thought was a scheme/sheaf being defined is actually the finite field with six elements. It also misread “Thue” as “the”.

If you had corrected what it read from the board, then gave it the context that he was a number theorist now working for a company trying to get AI to work through proofs, then you may have got the correct answer that this appears to be them crafting problems on polynomial reduction to test how the LLM reasons about proof.

bmitc• 8 months ago

I get the impression doing something like the title is a dream of many Chinese AI researchers

Not sure if you meant to imply otherwise, but Ken Ono is of Japanese decent.

impossiblefork5• 8 months ago

No, I didn't mean to imply it, but rather that this direction is now one that more people than people in China care about.

bgwalter• 8 months ago

Can anyone remember a VC startup that announced they'd implement a complex product that is essentially research, got a lot of capital and then succeeded?

Truly complex novel products are made in secrecy. If you announce something, you want to cash in on the hype.

__patchbit__• 8 months ago

Elon Musk and Daniella Fong pursue interesting research ideas backed by VC and expect to succeed and scale.

charlieyu1• 8 months ago

It’s almost like tech world pays more and has less bullshit than academia

jrussino• 8 months ago

pays more

Definitely

has less bullshit

Is there a Theranos equivalent in the world of math research? I'd argue "very different flavor of bullshit", but not necessarily less of it.

pstuart• 8 months ago

It's almost as if assembling people with different viewpoints and competing incentives produces "organizational challenges."

rasz• 8 months ago

Plenty of Theranos level academia fraud in physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

stavarotti• 8 months ago

I always find this characterization baffling. Why does it matter if it's a 24 year-old vs 30, 35, or 50? Many aspects of life that we hold near and dear were created by very "young" people.

tmaly• 8 months ago

did anyone else open the article and get the feeling he was leaving academia for a different reason.

readthenotes1• 8 months ago

You should read the credentials of Hong--hen is extraordinary

(I'm using the swedish gender-neutral pronoun because, although gender matters for your comment, the impressiveness of the credentials don't)

jhanschoo• 8 months ago

This is just a puff piece for an AI startup

bookofjoe• 8 months ago

no paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-ono-carina-hong-axiom-s...

The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old

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