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Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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

#61

Post by jazzyjackson »

nphardon wrote: post #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.

He's been in AI-land forever, the whole idea of Wolfram Alpha circa 2009 was to transform natural language into algorithms. I met him briefly in New York when he was on a panel on AI ethics in 2016, and ya, dude is sharp.

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

#62

Post by irishcoffee »

keybored wrote: post #10
petcat wrote: 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.

I just read it in Morgan Freemans voice and it sounded pretty great.

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

#64

Post by danpalmer »

LLMs using code to answer questions is nothing new, it's why the "how many Rs in strawberry" question doesn't trip them up anymore, because they can write a few lines of Python to answer it, run that, and return the answer.

Mathematica / Wolfram Language as the basis for this isn't bad (it's arguably late), because it's a highly integrated system with, in theory, a lot of consistency. It should work well.

That said, has it been designed for sandboxing? A core requirement of this "CAG" is sandboxing requirements. Python isn't great for that, but it's possible due to the significant effort put in by many over years. Does Wolfram Language have that same level? As it's proprietary, it's at a disadvantage, as any sandboxing technology would have to be developed by Wolfram Research, not the community.

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

#65

Post by oefrha »

fragmede wrote: post #45
Davidzheng wrote: post #40

There's a lot of value in the implementation of many strong and fast algeorithms in computer algebra in proprietary tools such as Maple, Wolfram, Matlab. However, I (though of course believe that such work needs to be compensated) find it against the spirit of science to keep them from the general public. I think it would be good service to use AI tools to bring open source alternatives like sympy and sage and macaul…

> against the spirit of science Unfortunately, the bank doesn't accept spirit of science dollars, and neither does the restaurant down the street from me either.

Society already funds a lot of scientific research. Some of that funding currently goes to private pockets like Wolfram Research, who license out their proprietary tech under expensive and highly limiting licenses (they're licensed per CPU core, Oracle style), so that scientists can do scientific computing.

As a former Mathematica user, a good part of the core functionality is great and ahead of open source, the rest and especially a lot of me-too functionality added over the years is mediocre at best and beaten by open source, while the ecosystem around it is basically nonexistent thanks to the closed nature, so anything not blessed by Wolfram Research is painful. In open source, say Python, people constantly try to outdo each other in performance, DX, etc.; and whatever you need there's likely one or more libraries for it, which you can inspect to decide for yourself or even extend yourself. With Wolfram, you get what you get in the form of binary blobs.

I would love to see institutions pooling resources to advance open source scientific computing, so that it finally crosses the threshold of open and better (from the current open and sometimes better).

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

#67

Post by Joel_Mckay »

lutusp wrote: post #55

Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!" The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent. And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion…

I like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects.

There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA.

I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs.

Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms.

The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3

"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod)

https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...

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

#68

Post by galaxyLogic »

currymj wrote: post #18
mr_mitm wrote: 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 don't think we should pick a winner. When it comes to mathematical answers the best would to pose the same query to all of them and if they all give the same result then our space-rocket is probably going in the right direction.

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

#69

Post by golem14 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #57
falcor84 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with anything? We as a culture decided that science is worthwhile, and that it's worth funding it with public money, which I personally strongly support. With that in mind, I want us to continue contributing to making scientific research and the benefits that it provides to be disseminated freely, while also paying good scientists with actual dollars that they could spend in restaurants.

>We as a culture decided that science is worthwhile, and that it's worth funding it with public money, which I personally strongly support. what country are you in, and what percentage of the public purse goes to funding science? In the U.S about 11%, and with that number I often read articles, linked to from this site, about U.S Scientists quitting and going into private sector work or other non-scientific fields to…

Um, where did you get the 11% from?

Looking at https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-fe..., federal tax revenue used for "science" seems to be Education is another 5% accroding to that site.

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