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Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

writings.stephenwolfram.com

11–20 of 188 posts

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#11
post #8

I like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.

Back when I was using it, mathematica was unmatched in its ability to find integrals. Has python caught up there?

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#12
post #4
post #2

Sounds cool. Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

If you go back to a random much older post you’ll find emdashes aplenty. e.g. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2014/07/launching-mathem...

Plot twist - AI reasoned that Stephen Wolfram actually was the smartest human and thus chose to emulate his writing style.

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#13
post #6
post #2

Sounds cool. Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

If there is one person who likes to hear himself talk too much to use AI, it's got to be Stephen Wolfram.

It's like Stephen Wolfram, only now there is 10x more of it...

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#14
post #3
post #2

Sounds cool. Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

The other day I formatted a sentence out loud in the "it's not just x it's y" structure and immediately felt gross, despite having done it probably a million times in my lifetime. That was an out-of-body feeling.

When I notice that I change it to "it's y, not just x" just to catch others off guard :).

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#15
There's a great discussion with Stephen Wolfram on the Sean Carroll podcast. Listening to it made me think very highly of Wolfram. He's a free thinking, eccentric, mathematician, scientist; who got started doing serious work at a very young age. He still has a youthful creative approach to thought and science. I hope LLMs do pair well with his tools.

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#16
post #2

Sounds cool. Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

If you really want to know: more than one emmy-dash per paragraph is probably excessive. > LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation. This is a mess. What is the flow here? Two abrupt interrupts ( and useful ) followed by stubby sentences. Yucky.

Idk about the grammatical correctness of the punctuation, but I really enjoyed reading his writing. Never read something by him before, it was genuinely refreshing, specially given it was a glorified ad.

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#17
post #2

Sounds cool. Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

There are dozens of us that used them before AI! Dozens!

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#18
post #11
post #8

I like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.

Back when I was using it, mathematica was unmatched in its ability to find integrals. Has python caught up there?

sympy is good enough for typical uses. the user interface is worse but that doesn't matter to Claude. I imagine if you have some really weird symbolic or numeric integrals, Mathematica may have some highly sophisticated algorithms where it would have an edge.

however, even this advantage is eaten away somewhat because the models themselves are decent at solving hard integrals.

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#19
post #18
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I was using it, mathematica was unmatched in its ability to find integrals. Has python caught up there?

sympy is good enough for typical uses. the user interface is worse but that doesn't matter to Claude. I imagine if you have some really weird symbolic or numeric integrals, Mathematica may have some highly sophisticated algorithms where it would have an edge. however, even this advantage is eaten away somewhat because the models themselves are decent at solving hard integrals.

I've always sort of assumed the models were just making sympy scripts behind the scenes.

Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

#20
post #8

I like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.

What do you think the problem is?

I think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing.

But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.

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