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What happens when a 22-year-old turns down big tech job offers to build his own AI?

Emerging tech and AI1 min readSam Page

Something pretty impressive it seems!

Joseph Reth has just released Aristotle X1, a model that’s outperformed OpenAI, Grok, DeepSeek and Gemini in two of the toughest benchmarks:

GPQA Diamond (tests PhD-level scientific reasoning)
SimpleQA (tests fact-based, short-answer accuracy)

Instead of joining a big start-up, Joseph followed what he believed in, went his own way, and now he’s got Oracle backing him too.

Aristotle X1 doesn’t just churn out answers to general questions.

It's not aiming to be another chatbot.

The ambition is much bigger: an AI tool built specifically to drive scientific breakthroughs.

To me this is a great example of what can happen when AI isn't stretched to be everything, but is focused on excelling in one area.

Although note, it still SIGNIFICANTLY outperformed the other LLMs on the SimpleQA benchmark.

I think we're going to see a lot more use case specific AI models like this in the near future.

One single LLM that can do it all just doesn't work in practice as demonstrated by some of the models such as ChatGPT 5 potentially reaching scaling limits due to available resources.

First published on LinkedIn.

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---
title: "What happens when a 22-year-old turns down big tech job offers to build his own AI?"
url: https://sam-page.com/thinking/what-happens-when-a-22-year-old-turns-down-big-tech-job-offers-to-build-his-own
date: 2025-08-21
author: Sam Page
type: Post or article
categories: [Emerging tech and AI]
reading_time: 1 min
summary: "Something pretty impressive it seems!"
first_published: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7364225831189028864
---

# What happens when a 22-year-old turns down big tech job offers to build his own AI?

Something pretty impressive it seems!

![](https://sam-page.com/img/thinking/what-happens-when-a-22-year-old-turns-down-big-tech-job-offers-to-buil-li1.webp)

Joseph Reth has just released Aristotle X1, a model that’s outperformed OpenAI, Grok, DeepSeek and Gemini in two of the toughest benchmarks:

GPQA Diamond (tests PhD-level scientific reasoning)  
SimpleQA (tests fact-based, short-answer accuracy)

Instead of joining a big start-up, Joseph followed what he believed in, went his own way, and now he’s got Oracle backing him too.

Aristotle X1 doesn’t just churn out answers to general questions.

It's not aiming to be another chatbot.

The ambition is much bigger: an AI tool built specifically to drive scientific breakthroughs.

To me this is a great example of what can happen when AI isn't stretched to be everything, but is focused on excelling in one area.

Although note, it still SIGNIFICANTLY outperformed the other LLMs on the SimpleQA benchmark.

I think we're going to see a lot more use case specific AI models like this in the near future.

One single LLM that can do it all just doesn't work in practice as demonstrated by some of the models such as ChatGPT 5 potentially reaching scaling limits due to available resources.