A few short months ago, we launched Axiom Reason: our first experiment to spread the benefits of formal ontology beyond large enterprise companies. Our goal with Axiom was to build a general platform for discourse in formal logic, and let anyone bring any problem, including the most intractable and emotionally charged. I am proud of the progress we have made towards that goal. By harnessing the recent advances in language models, we made far more progress in a number of areas than I expected in such a short time. In that time, I have also had some of the best conversations of my life over Axiom with entrepreneurs, professors, social media content creators, friends, and family members.
As discussed in Reality Can Be Modeled, I believe the long-term solution to humanity’s wicked problems involves using formal logic to directly communicate our beliefs and values. This approach will finally enable us to make durable progress in understanding that lets us coordinate with respect to these problems. However, there are still many challenges to overcome before that becomes viable for most people and circumstances. Using the Axiom of today to solve these problems is like trying to scale the mountain by climbing directly up the cliff face.
Meanwhile, there are many immediate issues facing people, costing them time and money with each day they go unsolved. Adopting intelligence technology safely is one of them, and it’s first and foremost an ontology problem. To delegate work to a machine with confidence, a business has to make its processes, intended outcomes, and guardrails explicit enough to be checked. Coherence Labs is positioned to help and, given the inflection point this technology is at, it is incumbent on us to ensure the benefits of these technologies are realized as widely as possible.
For that reason, we are making two important changes over the coming weeks. We are
- Reworking Axiom Reason to lean into the aspects that made it most successful and sunsetting the hosted publishing platform.
- Opening up Coherence Labs to work directly with businesses, providing the structure they need to adopt technology with ease and confidence.
First, we’ve reflected on our experience and the feedback we’ve gotten from those using Axiom. Fewer people wanted a publishing platform for formal logic than we expected, and more people wanted the insights and conversations it facilitated. The aspects of Axiom that provide the most value to people currently are the Socratic partner and the experience of discussing an Axiom theorem or definition outside of the platform, over a call or in person. By contrast, the bulk of our maintenance effort went to the parts a public publishing platform requires, such as the server-side Lean validator, which blocks malicious Lean code from being published. To align our efforts with the value provided to users, we are open sourcing much of the Axiom system as a free tool for self-reflection and group collaboration, and sunsetting the publishing platform.
Second, we’ve recognized that while Axiom benefits some people, it’s the wrong type of product to help a lot of the people we want to help. Small and medium business owners, for example, are in a particularly challenging position. On one hand, the last 18 months of advancements in intelligence technology have opened up immense opportunities for them to save time and money, and scale their business by making themselves and their employees much more productive. On the other hand, these systems have a lot of unintuitive failure modes and other sharp edges, and a business can’t afford to break the processes that were working by hastily trying to reimagine itself around new technology. That’s why we’re now working with business owners directly: delivering value they can measure this quarter, with the personal touch that lets them learn the technology at a pace that works for them, so their business is positioned to maximally benefit from future innovations.
Our new tagline, “Complexity Made Coherent,” reflects the core shift in our strategy: you bring your complexity, we provide coherence via concrete tools that save you time, make you money, or improve your product. If you’re a thinker looking to analyze the coherence of your ideas, try out the free Axiom toolkit. If you’re a small business owner who needs help adopting technology with confidence, reach out today. We’re taking on our first clients now.