Unlocked gift article: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/math-ken-ono-carina-hong-axiom-s...
The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#12For 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”
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#13Any predictions on When the rizz and swagger of AI wears off and gets replaced by the next fad?
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#14I 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.
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#15I 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 overp…
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
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#16Can 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.
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#17I 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 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...
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#18I 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 overp…
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.
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#19It’s almost like tech world pays more and has less bullshit than academia
Re: The Math Legend Who Just Left Academia–For an AI Startup Run by a 24-Year-Old
#20[flagged]
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.