axiom-math
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Ken Ono: The Mathematician Who Stopped Racing the Machine
Mathematician Ken Ono recounts the year that upended his identity: hired to invent problems hard enough to stump ChatGPT for the FrontierMath project, he discovered that large language models now know more facts than any human alive. Rather than despairing about how to 'stay ahead of AI,' Ono argues that is the wrong question entirely. He reframes intelligence as the human capacity to ask new questions, create concepts, and connect ideas across fields, weaving in the story of self-taught genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, his own near-dropout youth, and a plea to rescue the wonder that machines can never replicate.
Axiom
Axiom (Axiom Math) is a Palo Alto-based AI lab building a self-improving, superintelligent reasoner - starting with an AI mathematician. Its AxiomProver system invents new theorems, proves them formally in Lean, and verifies them before they reach a human, aiming to give AI the one thing language models lack: provable correctness. Founded in 2025 by mathematician Carina Hong, the company has raised $264M and claims machine-generated proofs accepted by peer-reviewed journals.
Carina Hong
Carina Hong is the founder and CEO of Axiom Math, an AI startup building an autonomous "AI mathematician" that can generate and formally verify its own proofs. A Guangzhou-born first-generation college student, she finished dual MIT degrees in math and physics in three years, won the Morgan Prize, became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, then left a Stanford PhD-and-JD track to start Axiom in March 2025. Her thesis is blunt: "Math is AGI." Within roughly nine months the company raised about $264M total, reached a reported $1.6B valuation, and pulled researchers from Meta FAIR, Meta GenAI, and Google Brain/DeepMind.