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Leaving Academia for an AI Startup and getting hired by your student!

The New Axiom: When Expertise Meets Unconventional Value Shashi | 2025-12-06 | ReadyThoughts.com
Inspired by the reporting of Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal.

The Greatest Liability in Expertise is Certainty

The collaboration between Ken Ono and Carina Hong at Axiom Math is not a sentimental story; it is a profound lesson in prioritizing **Exponential Business Value** over secure, linear careers.

The True Cost of Certainty

Ken Ono, a renowned mathematician, once expressed skepticism about AI’s capacity for original discovery. Yet, at age 57, he left his tenured position at UVA to join Axiom Math, a startup founded by his former student, Carina Hong.

The common knowledge take is that AI automates tasks. The thought leader take is this: **The highest Business Value creation today is not automating existing production but accelerating the speed of intellectual discovery itself**.

Professor Ono’s pivot is a public acknowledgment that the exponential value offered by Axiom Math—to build an AI capable of generating new mathematical truths—warrants dismantling decades of personal conviction. He is demonstrating that if an innovation challenges the source of creation, the highest-value move is to guide that change, not defend the status quo.

Carina Hong: Rejecting the Conventional Summit

Carina Hong, 24, abandoned an already high-value, dual J.D./Ph.D. path at Stanford. She recognized that **Business Value scales with the scope of the problem solved, not the number of degrees earned**.

Her company is attempting to generate fundamental new mathematical knowledge—a task that underpins all engineering, science, and advanced AI. This potential for non-linear return far exceeds the incremental value of any conventional professional career.

Thought Leader Take: The Axiom of Value

This partnership is proof that **if your organizational structure or personal conviction cannot adapt when a fundamental source of creation shifts, your expertise becomes a historical artifact, not a competitive asset.** The real value is realized at the intersection of foundational expertise (Ono) and a willingness to completely rethink the underlying infrastructure of knowledge creation (Hong).

Key Facts on Axiom Math
  • Founder: Carina Hong (Letong Hong)
  • Founding Mathematician: Ken Ono
  • Goal: Building an AI to discover and prove mathematical theorems.
  • Business Value: Accelerating fundamental mathematical knowledge, a basis for all science and technology.

This paradigm shift proves that true intellectual value demands participation in the future, regardless of one's past stature.

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