How a 24-year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout recruited some of Meta’s top talent to work for her AI math company
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How a 24 year old Stanford Ph.D. dropout recruited some of Meta's top talent to work for her AI math company. Credit: Axiom Math founder and CEO Carina Hong
Top Meta AI researchers have joined 24-year-old Carina Hong’s firm, Axiom Math.
How a 24-year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout recruited some of Meta’s top talent to work for her AI math company. Top Meta AI researchers have been hired by a 24-year-old Stanford dropout to work for her fledgling firm, which is developing an AI mathematician. Carina Hong, a Rhodes Scholar, founded Axiom Math in March after quitting her doctorate studies at Stanford.
Axiom announced a $64 million seed round in September and recently claimed to have solved two Erdos math issues that mathematicians had been unable to solve for decades.
The firm employs 17 people, several of them come from Google Brain, which merged with DeepMind in 2023, Meta’s GenAI team, and Meta’s Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab.
Axiom is working on advanced math
Axiom is working on advanced math, which leaders and researchers in AI believe is crucial to reaching superintelligence. Hong claims that she was able to attract top people from Big Tech companies because to this goal.
“Solving for mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy, according to some of the top researchers and mathematicians I’ve recruited to Axiom,” Hong told Business Insider. “Talent density gets very high when the problem is hard enough, and that makes you a magnet for other great thinkers.”
Hong told Business Insider that she concentrated part of her initial hiring efforts on FAIR because “they consistently deliver amazing research work.”
One of the oldest pillars of Meta’s quickly developing AI organization
One of the oldest pillars of Meta’s quickly developing AI organization, FAIR is dedicated to long-term research. Yann LeCun, the company’s chief scientist, announced in November that he was leaving Meta to launch his own AI startup after Meta laid off members of that team in October.
Axiom Math’s Meta recruits include Francois Charton, Aram Markosyan, Hugh Leather, and Shubho Sengupta, the company’s first member and current CTO, whom Hong met by coincidence at a coffee shop.
Hong claimed that although Meta provided substantial industry-wide retention packages
Hong claimed that although Meta provided substantial industry-wide retention packages during the time she was assembling her team, she was unaware of any particular rival offers.
According to Hong, Axiom’s potential long-term upside helped draw researchers in a competitive talent market. Additionally, she stated that they have been thrilled about the mission since day one, when the office was set up with a friend’s extra couch and a plastic folding table.
Big Tech isn’t the only place Hong hires. She hired renowned mathematician Ken Ono, her old professor, according to a Wall Street Journal story published on Thursday.
Age and experience, according to Hong, are “sort of manmade concepts,” and she has been used to collaborating with more experienced scholars throughout her academic career. Additionally, she has worked to build a “non-hierarchical” culture at Axiom.
Recruiters are drawn to the organization because of its objective, which goes beyond arithmetic. According to Hong, Axiom may find economic use in “any domain where you need provably correct reasoning,” including cryptography, quantitative finance, and hardware and software verification.
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