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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

#91

Post by Karrot_Kream »

oefrha wrote: post #65
fragmede wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Isn't plugging Wolfram algorithms into LLMs basically their current solution for the DX problem?

As far as society funding research, while I'm quite sympathetic to this view, Wolfram also puts in a significant amount of private dollars into the operationalization of their systems. My guess is there's a whole range of algorithms that aren't prominent enough to publish a paper on nor economically lucrative enough to build a company on that Wolfram products sell.

That said I do think LLM coding agents offer a great way forward to implement more papers on a FOSS manner.

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

#92

Post by inigoalonso »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #60
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.

So if as a culture we decide scientists are worth paying to do research, why should Wolfram not be paid to build the tool scientists use?

Nobody is saying "don't pay the developers". Some of us advocate for "pay the developers to develop free and open source software". Rent-seeking is not good for society.

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

#93

Post by fragmede »

Micoloth wrote: post #84
vjk800 wrote: post #81

Every major technological invention nowadays quickly breeds open source clones that evolve to be on par with the commercial ones on some time scale. Why hasn't this happened to Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica? I know there's Sympy, but it's so far behind Mathematica that it's not even comparable. Is the heavily mathematical nature of the tool somehow an insurmountable obstacle to the open source community?

It’s a great question. As soneone who has been fascinated by Wolfram Aplha for a loong time (and might or might not have thought about cloning it), i think that growing up i ended up realizing that Mathematica in the real world just doesn’t… Do much? Maybe i’m just missing something. But it looks like nobody is really using it except for some very specific math research which has grown from within that ecosystem from…

What you're missing is everything not on the public Internet. Everything hidden away from you and me. Everything done in secret. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound?

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

#94

Post by larodi »

One thing me.Stephen never made available is for people to copy results of Wolfram Alpha… he persisted doing so even after ocr and LLms were omnipresent, so somehow I don’t trust him even though his reload theory seems very appealing and apparently the team there understands production grammars very well since 1996.

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

#95

Post by danpalmer »

simianwords wrote: post #87
danpalmer wrote: post #64

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,…

>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. False. It has nothing to do with tool use but just reasoning.

It's so easy to google this and find that they all do exactly this.

Gemini: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/code-execution

ChatGPT: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8437071-data-analysis-wi...

Claude: https://claude.com/blog/analysis-tool

Reasoning only gets you so far, even humans write code or use spreadsheets, calculators, etc, to get their answers to problems.

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

#96

Post by danpalmer »

adius wrote: post #72
danpalmer wrote: post #64

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,…

I also think that sandboxing is crucial. That’s why I’m working on a Wolfram Language interpreter that can be run fully sandboxed via WebAssembly: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

Awesome. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the Wolfram Language, but my understanding that the power of it came from the fact it was very batteries-included in terms of standard library and even data connections (like historical weather or stock market data).

What exactly does Woxi implement? Is it an open source implementation of the core language? Do you have to bring your own standard library or can you use the proprietary one? How do data connections fit into the sandboxing?

I realise I may be uninformed enough here that some of these might not make sense though, interested to learn.

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

#97

Post by vixen99 »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #67
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 c…

'I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution.'

In the light of ' Almost half of the 6 million people needing treatment from the NHS in England have had no further care at all since joining a hospital waiting list, new data reveals. Previously unseen NHS England figures show that 2.99 million of the 6.23 million patients (48%) awaiting care have not had either their first appointment with a specialist or a diagnostic test since being referred by a GP.'

- Assuming it's successful in its goal, can your country tell Britain how to do it? Please!

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

#98

Post by laserbeam »

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 to keep them from the general public

Within science, participants have always published descriptions of methodology and results for review and replication. Within the same science, participants have never made access to laboratories free for everyone. You get blueprints for how to build a lab and what to do in it, you don't get the building.

Same for computation. I'm fairly sure almost all (if not all) algorithms in these suites are documented somewhere and you can implement them if you want. No one is restricting you from the knowledge. You just don't get the implementation for free.

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

#99

Post by adius »

yorwba wrote: post #77
adius wrote: post #70

I agree, but to be truly foundational, it needs to be open source and accessible for everyone! That’s why I’m working on an open source implementation of Mathematica (i.e. an Wolfram Language interpreter): https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

Isn't most of the value of Mathematica in the standard library instead of the language?

Yes, definitely! So we also try to implement as much of it as possible. Currently we support over 900 functions of the 6000 from Mathematica!

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

#100

Post by adius »

danpalmer wrote: post #96
adius wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think that sandboxing is crucial. That’s why I’m working on a Wolfram Language interpreter that can be run fully sandboxed via WebAssembly: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

Awesome. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the Wolfram Language, but my understanding that the power of it came from the fact it was very batteries-included in terms of standard library and even data connections (like historical weather or stock market data). What exactly does Woxi implement? Is it an open source implementation of the core language? Do you have to bring your own standard library or can you use the proprieta…

Yes, we agree that a lot of the value comes from the huge standard library. That's why we try to implement as much of it as possible. Right now we support more than 900 functions. All the Data functions will be a little more complicated of course, but they could e.g make a request to online data archives (ourworldindata.org, wikidata.org, …). So I think it's definitely doable.

We also want to provide an option for users to add their own functions to the standard library. So if they e.g. need `FinancialData[]` they could implement it themselves and provide it as a standard library function.

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