About this episode

Carina Hong discusses Axiom's achievements in AI and the challenges ahead in the pursuit of AGI.

In 2025, seven-month-old startup Axiom solved all 12 of the problems Putnam exam (scoring 8/12 in the time limit) a prestigious undergraduate math exam. The 12/12 score is better than the top undergraduates (110/120) and the closest AI system that reported a result (DeepSeek 103/120), although it is unclear what the people and other systems would have scored with more time. Nonetheless, the Putnam exam is legendary for its difficulty, with the median score typically being 0 or 1 points. Taken by itself, this seems like a minor feather in the cap of AI; one of a long series of accomplishments by AI systems in elite competitions with humans, starting with Deep Blue beating Kasparov. Fast forward to mid-2026, and Claude Code is eating the world. In 2024 Anthropic’s bet on code and enterprise looked like a more pragmatic niche play vs. OpenAI’s better models and massive consume scale. Today, Amodei’s all in bet on acceleration via code (images and video be damned) seems prescient. Despite Anthropic’s growing momentum, however, Axiom CEO Carina Hong sees coding ability as a necessary but not sufficient milestone on the path to AGI. Code arguably pushes the jagged frontier to the point…

People in this episode

Guest: Carina Hong

Topics covered

• AI progress
• AGI
• coding ability
• math benchmarks
• Putnam exam
• super intelligence

Keywords

• Axiom
• Putnam exam
• AGI
• coding
• AI progress
• super intelligence
• DeepSeek
• Claude Code

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Axiom, Anthropic, OpenAI

Products: Claude Code, DeepSeek

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