A 24-year-old Stanford University dropout brought top meta-AI researchers to her startup, which is training AI mathematicians.
Axiom Math is the brainchild of Karina Hong, a Rhodes Scholar who founded the company in March after dropping out of Stanford graduate school.
Axiom recently announced that it had solved two Erdos math problems that mathematicians had been unable to solve for decades, and announced a $64 million seed round in September.
The company has 17 employees, many from Meta's Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Lab, Meta's GenAI team and Google Brain, which merged with DeepMind in 2023.
Axiom works on the advanced mathematics that AI researchers and leaders believe is essential to achieving superintelligence. Hong says this mission has helped attract top talent from Big Tech companies.
“One of the things I've heard from some of the top researchers and mathematicians I've hired at Axiom is that solving mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy,” Hong told Business Insider. “If the problem is hard enough, the density of talent will be very high, which will attract other great thinkers.”
Hong told Business Insider that he focused some of his early recruiting efforts on FAIR because “FAIR consistently delivers great research results.”
FAIR is one of the oldest pillars of Meta's rapidly evolving AI organization, focused on long-term research. Meta laid off its team in October and subsequently lost chief scientist Yann LeCun, who announced in November that he would be leaving Meta to start his own AI startup.
Axiom Math's Meta hires include Shubho Sengupta, who Hong first met by chance at a coffee shop and is now Axiom's CTO, as well as Francois Charton, Aram Markosyan, and Hugh Leather.
Hong said that while building the team, Meta offered significant retention packages across the industry, but was unaware of any specific competing offers.
In a competitive talent market, Axiom's potential long-term benefits helped attract researchers, Hong said. And they were excited about the mission from day one, when their office was outfitted with a plastic folding table and a friend's extra couch.
Hong isn't just hiring from big tech companies. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that she has proposed marriage to her former professor, renowned mathematician Ken Ono.
Hong considers age and experience to be “kind of artificial concepts” and said he was used to working with senior researchers during his time in academia. She also worked to instill a “non-hierarchical” culture at Axiom.
The company's mission goes beyond math, which is also appealing to new employees. Hong said Axiom's commercial applications could include hardware and software verification, quantitative finance, cryptography and “any area where provably correct inference is needed.”
