AI Supremacy

A PhD in Math takes a closer look at LLMs, Paul Erdős and AI’s role in maths and science

Can AI further science? How are hugely well funded AI labs like OpenAI trying to prove this? Today’s article explores the fascinating case of the frontiers of Mathematics. I geek out also about AI’s impact on science as evidenced by a new breed of AI startups generally understood as Neo Labs. To me these are moonshots that are typically highly funded AI research labs, often founded by elite ex-researchers from giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain.

• The pace of “Neo Lab” (a new category of AI startup) creation, AI labs designed to focus on pushing AI faster have received considerable recently funding like Mirendil, Engram, General Intuition, Prometheus, Trajectory and more.
• Mirendil is building “self-accelerating” AI that can do the actual work of an AI researcher. For instance, they train frontier models that are expert at AI R&D and build the product around it.
• Engram (eight months old) is an AI infrastructure startup building a persistent, learned memory layer for artificial intelligence in a bid to improve model efficiency and curb skyrocketing costs. The company says its technology can dramatically reduce the cost of running AI at enterprise scale. The B2B company trains models to study an organization’s documents, workflows, and institutional knowledge in advance, compressing that material into what it calls a “learned memory” layer that can be reused across queries. Read their introductory article here.
• General Intuition AI is a high-profile frontier AI research lab focused on building Large Action Models (LAMs) and “world models” designed to perceive, predict, and act in real time across virtual and physical spaces. Also that AI can learn from video games. Confusing to me in a nutshell, an agentic model that can generalize from gameplay to simulation to embodiment is General Intuition’s raison d’être. The Series A had some heavy hitters like Khosla Ventures, with participation from Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and researchers from Google DeepMind and MIT.
• Prometheus is a prominent AI startup founded in November 2025 by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj (co-CEOs). I wrote about it here. In an era where physical AI and recursive self-learning AI are hot topics, this unique startup Prometheus, is focused on building AI models for physical tasks.It’s a massive bet to rearchitect how physical things are made. The prototypical definition of what a Neo Lab is post Anthropic, reimagining what’s possible not just with LLMs, but world models, RSI and training physics based datasets.
• Trajectory is building the platform for continual learning. Trajectory is betting the rapid iteration cycle that supercharged vibe-coding can help all kinds of companies build AI products that learn continuously. Their core thesis is that software products shouldn’t rely on static, frozen AI models; instead, they should act as “living systems” that continuously learn, steer, and improve from real-world user interactions.