'Math Is AGI': How Axiom Math's Carina Hong Uses It To Solve AI Code's Mess
Axiom has solved some of math's trickiest problems, reaching a $1.6B valuation in just 9 months. CEO Carina Hong shares her journey, and how it can make better code, on The Upstarts Podcast.
Midway through our conversation, Axiom Math CEO Carina Hong casually slips in: “Math is AGI.”
The line obviously caught our attention, and hopefully yours, too. What’s she mean?
To hear Hong explain it, math and code are intertwined. Computation gives you an output; a mathematical proof gives you a property. Combine the two, and you can get real-time verification of code that works, and doesn’t collapse as spaghetti slop.
The business implications are wide-ranging: faster scientific discovery and research cycles; cheaper and safer testing for industrial applications that protect human lives; scalable ways to maintain regulatory and compliance requirements.
“The part that is actually quite beautiful is that it’s not about erasing hallucination or catching mistakes,” she says.
Instead, it’s about including the rigor of a mathematical proof in the process before they happen.
It’s a big enough opportunity that last year, Hong left an academic track, as a Morgan Prize winner at MIT, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and joint law student and PhD candidate at Stanford, to start her own company.
In just nine months, Axiom Math shipped a tool that can solve some of math’s more advanced problems, and Axiom raised $200 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. But Hong, a first-time founder, is very much an Upstart looking to hold her own alongside the big AI labs and competitors like Harmonic, the unicorn co-founded by Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, and Logical Intelligence, whose launch we covered in Upstarts in September.
On this episode of The Upstarts Podcast, Hong shares her founder journey from immigrant at MIT to Oxford, and ultimately dropping out of Stanford; how she’s learning as a first-time founder to help Axiom compete in a red-hot new category; and her Upstart Moment when Axiom took the world’s hardest college-level math test, the Putnam Competition.
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This season of The Upstarts Podcast is presented by Mercury.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:48 Intro to Carina Hong
02:02 What Axiom Math does
05:51 ‘Math is AGI’
08:48 Not replacing mathematicians
13:28 Winning the Morgan Prize
17:17 Origins of Axiom
22:22 The new math AI race
25:51 Carina’s Upstart Moment
31:47 Axiom’s business prospects
36:39 Why the future is verified coding
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For paid subscribers, we break down our top 3 takeaways from our chat with Carina below:
