Why Being Smart Makes You Replaceable | Ken Ono, Axiom Math
In a Nutshell
Ken Ono, a mathematician at Axiom Math, realized AI like ChatGPT outperforms humans in knowledge recall, making raw smarts replaceable—true intelligence lies in judgment, reasoning, pattern recognition across disciplines, and creative inference, not facts. Inspired by Srinivasa Ramanujan's autodidact genius and his own dropout path to expertise in mock theta functions, he critiques high-stakes education for stifling passion and advocates AI as a cheap tutor to foster wonder, curiosity, and self-directed learning over perfectionism and debt-trapping careers. Undiscovered "Ramanujans" exist everywhere; nurture bravery in following interests to propel fields forward.
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Exactly one year ago, Ken Ono was a happy-go-lucky university professor writing papers, enjoying the privilege of being good at mathematics. Then came a dramatic change: he became deeply troubled. For the first time, he struggled to assemble questions that ChatGPT would get wrong. These models know more facts than any human. He was devastated, wondering how to stay ahead of AI, but realizes that's the wrong question. Knowledge has become cheap; trying to always stay ahead of AI means losing.
Ken Ono is a mathematician working in AI for math, a professor at the University of Virginia on leave, and the founding mathematician at Axiom Math.
In 1993, the first time he heard 'artificial intelligence,' he met a faculty member and cockily said, "I specialize in natural intelligence." A year ago, as a professor at the University of Virginia, he faced large language models through the Frontier Math program by Epoch AI in Berkeley. They hired professional mathematicians worldwide to create difficult math problems to assess LLMs. He struggled to make questions ChatGPT would get wrong and had early access to state-of-the-art models.
These models know more facts than any human you would ever find.
LLMs are the most extraordinary librarian: if written down, on YouTube, or in newspapers, they've seen it. Nobody watches Usain Bolt race a motorcycle; society accepts machines outperforming humans physically, now intellectually too. Information collection is unbeatable, but using and verifying it is expensive. No one wants a librarian as neurosurgeon or air traffic controller—human judgment matters.
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