self-improving-ai
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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.
Tim Shi
Tim Shi is the co-founder and former CTO of Cresta, the AI platform for contact centers that grew to over $100M ARR and raised $401M from Sequoia, a16z, and Greylock. A Tsinghua CS graduate who did early AI research at OpenAI alongside Andrej Karpathy — including the 'World of Bits' paper on web-based reinforcement learning agents — he co-founded Cresta in 2017 with Zayd Enam after both dropped out of Stanford's AI PhD program. In 2025, he co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, which emerged from stealth with $650M at a $4.65B valuation to build self-improving AI systems.