The $64M Bet on an AI That Has to Be Right | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom

Acxiom's mission is to build a reasoning engine that is self improving and that combines generation and verification. For Putnam, for people who aren't, like, math nerds, there's, like, a contest among math undergraduates that's incredibly hard. The median score is, like, a zero. We recently, Acxiom Prower, we got eight out of 12. 12. We use formal languages like Lean to ground the natural language counterpart. And because we are doing that, we witness the power of deterministic tooling and probabilistic system working together. You were on a academic path and now you're running this company. What made you decide to shift gears like this? When I was five, I would listen to, like, underground rock and roll music. They're obviously very politically rebellious and also, like, the contrarian appeal. I do think that this startup is, like, really fun, as in it's such a brand new adventure, and you're a bit living, like, the rock and roll day every day. What do you really predict for mathematics going forward? Mathematicians will learn to work on great mathematician, just let your intuition take you to wherever you want and have the AI mathematician be the diligent grad student trying to prove the intuitions you have. You're listening to Gradient Dissent, a show about making machine learning work in the real world, and I'm your host, Lukas Spiewald. Karina Hong is the CEO and founder of Acxiom Math, which is a company that calls itself a self reasoning system and is currently on the cutting edge of building an AI mathematician. They've had astonishingly strong results on math olympiad problems and recently got the highest score on the Putnam test, which we talk about. Karina is super interesting. She was a star academic mathematician, now turned into a founder. Acxiom Math came out of stealth having raised $64,000,000 She talks in detail about how Acxiom works, how she think it applies, to more than math over time, and also how rock and roll or hardcore rock and roll music in China influenced her her thinking around management and staying hungry. Hope you enjoy this interview. Corina, why don't we start by, the most basic question, which is, what is Acxiom and and how does it work at a high level? Yeah. So, Acxiom's mission is to build a reasoning engine, that is self improving, and that combines, like, generation and verification, which we think is like an overlooked component in the current AI landscape. And we want to start with an AI mathematician because math is a really good testing ground for this sort of self help loop. We use formal languages like lean to ground the natural language, counterpart. And because we are doing that, there are a lot of, you know, interesting capabilities we can unlock, with much higher sample efficiency. So the the general, I think, vision of of Axiom is there is a prover, you know, a system that can prove, theorems, and also a conjecture. …