Inference: When Will We Solve Intelligence
Summary
Turing Post's "Inference" series, launched in 2025, is evolving in 2026 to address the question "When Will We Solve Intelligence?" The series, which previously featured interviews with researchers and founders, will now adopt topic-driven interview cycles focusing on areas like robotics, open source, and coding. Each cycle will be accompanied by a "Topic Report" that synthesizes conversations, adds context, and highlights emerging patterns. The article highlights key themes from 2025 interviews, including "What Intelligence Is Missing" (reasoning failures, memory limits, hallucinations), "Coding and the Agentic Web" (agents, tools, developer workflows), "Who Is in Control" (trust, safety, human involvement), and "AI Meets the Real World" (physics, biology, institutions). Karina Hong, co-founder and CEO of Axium Math, discusses building an AI mathematician with a prover system, a knowledge base, and a conjecturer system, aiming for self-improving AI through a hybrid approach combining formal verification with large language models.
Key takeaway
For AI Scientists and Research Scientists focused on advancing mathematical reasoning, you should explore hybrid AI approaches that combine formal verification with large language models. This strategy addresses current AI limitations in complex, multi-step reasoning and offers a path toward verifiable, self-improving systems, particularly in scientific discovery and highly regulated enterprise applications.
Key insights
Solving intelligence requires a hybrid approach combining formal verification with large language models for robust reasoning.
Principles
- Mathematical discoveries have transformative power.
- AI can compress the timeline of scientific breakthroughs.
- Collaboration between humans and AI is crucial.
Method
Axium Math's AI mathematician integrates a prover for verifiable proofs, a knowledge base for new concepts, and a conjecturer for proposing new math problems, forming a self-improving loop.
In practice
- Explore Lean's "natural numbers game" for beginners.
- Formalize math theories in Lean's Mathlib.
- Consider formal verification for regulated industries.
Topics
- AI for Mathematics
- Formal Verification
- Automated Theorem Proving
- AI Research & Discovery
Best for: AI Scientist, Research Scientist, CTO, AI Researcher, AI Engineer, Data Scientist
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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Turing Post.