Building an AI Mathematician | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom Math

Carina Hong is CEO of Axiom Math, where they"re building a self-improving superintelligent reasoner, starting with an AI mathematician. She"s a Rhodes Scholar, first-gen college grad and mathematics prodigy who earned dual degrees in mathematics and physics from MIT in 3 years. And a joint JD/PhD at Stanford. They just raised a $64M seed round from B Capital, Greycroft, Madrona, and Menlo Ventures.  Carina"s favorite books: Proofs from THE BOOK (Author: Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler) (00:02) Intro (00:38) What self-improving mathematical superintelligence means (04:04) Proofs as programs: Lean and the data gap (06:36) How AI proves: human-style vs. Lean-style reasoning (10:43) Carina’s journey: from Olympiad problem-solver to theory-builder (14:47) The engine room: data, infra, and building a math knowledge graph (17:42) Verifying results: compile checks vs. LLM judges (18:56) Self-improvement loops: skills libraries, memory, and conjecture↔prover curricula (21:30) Synthetic data & auto-formalization strategy (24:00) Benchmarks that matter: miniF2F, CombiBench, miniCTX v2 (26:24) Why combinatorics is uniquely hard for AI (31:13) Compute footprint & scaling philosophy (32:20) In-house Lean tooling and productization path (33:57) Early use cases: formal verification in hardware/software (36:19) Team blueprint: AI, programming languages, and math (37:35) Scaling laws, efficiency, and bottlenecks (38:26) If Axiom works: what becomes cheaper/faster for the world (40:22) Rapid Fire Round -------- Where to find Carina Hong:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carina-hong/ -------- Where to find Prateek Joshi:  Research column: https://www.infrastartups.com Newsletter: https://prateekjoshi.substack.com  Website: https://prateekj.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prateek-joshi-infinite X: https://x.com/prateekvjoshi