jandrese 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days ago
No wonder Dennis Nedry was so aggrieved...
zem 2 days 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 2 days 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”

dctoedt 2 days ago
terrycody 2 days ago
May I ask how you did this?
dctoedt 21 hours ago
I’m a subscriber.
dctoedt 2 days ago
stavarotti 2 days 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.
impossiblefork 2 days 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.

bmitc 2 days 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.

impossiblefork 2 days 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.
OutOfHere 2 days 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...
lambdas 2 days 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.

ky3 2 days ago
M&Ms much? There is no finite field with six elements.
lambdas 23 hours ago
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.
OutOfHere 2 days ago
> 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.

impossiblefork 2 days ago
I don't think that's correct.
OutOfHere 2 days ago
You're not in any position to judge since you previously admitted having no idea.
impossiblefork 24 hours ago
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.

impossiblefork 19 hours ago
I mean not knowing what something is and knowing that it isn't a certain specific thing.
jhanschoo 2 days ago
This is just a puff piece for an AI startup
TrackerFF 2 days 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.
drweevil 2 days 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.
abirch 2 days ago
I agree with you. Even if this start up fails, it's not like he can't return to academia.
tmaly 2 days ago
did anyone else open the article and get the feeling he was leaving academia for a different reason.
readthenotes1 2 days 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)

bookofjoe 16 hours ago
srean 2 days ago
Interesting, seems wsj does not allow archive.is through their paywall
bgwalter 2 days 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__ 2 days ago
Elon Musk and Daniella Fong pursue interesting research ideas backed by VC and expect to succeed and scale.
charlieyu1 2 days ago
It’s almost like tech world pays more and has less bullshit than academia
jrussino 2 days 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.

rasz 2 days ago
Plenty of Theranos level academia fraud in physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
pstuart 2 days ago
It's almost as if assembling people with different viewpoints and competing incentives produces "organizational challenges."
josefritzishere 2 days ago
Any predictions on When the rizz and swagger of AI wears off and gets replaced by the next fad?