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.

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

No wonder Dennis Nedry was so aggrieved...

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.

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

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”

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

May I ask how you did this?

I’m a subscriber.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Those two are definitely banging. Mark my words, write it down.

Doubtful. I knew Ono as an undergrad at Wisconsin. He has far too much integrity for that.

He's always been involved in mentoring high schoolers, undergrads, and, of course, his own grad students. It's not surprising that he's working with a 24 year old.

He's a bundle of energy in math and sports and always looking for the new thing. Jumping in on a new project in a burgeoning field is very much his m.o.

> He has far too much integrity for that.

Do you think it would be lack of integrity on his part? They're both adults...

I understand about power dynamics bla bla bla, but as soon as you step out of University, she's the one who has the money.

That's an odd thing to say. She is 24 years old and has super impressive academic credentials. She raised almost 70 million which is a huge amount for any startup. The professor probably wants a change in his life and wants to work on something more exciting.

Cool story, now do Theranos.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

I don't think that's correct.

You're not in any position to judge since you previously admitted having no idea.

There's no contradiction between knowing what something is, and knowing that something does not support a certain view.

What you see on the board is presumably something relating to a maths problem they're discussing. It doesn't seem AI-related at all.

I mean not knowing what something is and knowing that it isn't a certain specific thing.

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.

M&Ms much? There is no finite field with six elements.

Tell him that, not me; I’m simply referring to what’s on the board, above her right hand, left of her stomach. Perhaps it’s abuse of notation.

> 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

It was just a quick and dirty chat. A proper evaluation will consider his published research to date.

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.

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

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

> 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.

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

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

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.

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

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)

This is just a puff piece for an AI startup

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