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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

#111

Post by danpalmer »

simianwords wrote: post #108
danpalmer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you have just linked the fact that they have code executions but not proved that it is needed for strawberry problem. there are multiple ways to disprove this 1. GPT o1 was released and it never supported the tools and it easily solved the strawberry problem - it was named strawberry internally 2. you can run GPT 5.2-thinking in the API right now and deny access to any tools, it will still work 3. you can run deepsee…

Oh right you're very focused on specifically the strawberry problem. I just gave that as a throwaway example. It's a solution but not necessarily the solution for something that simple.

My point was much more general, that code execution is a key part of these models ability to perform maths, analysis, and provide precise answers. It's not the only way, but a key way that's very efficient compared to more inference for CoT.

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

#112

Post by AJRF »

Every time I go to purchase a hobby license for Wolfram / Mathematica I give up because their product offering is the most convoluted i've seen in my life.

Why can't I just pay some price and get the entire bundle of Wolfram One Cloud + API calls + LLM Assistant + This new MCP access + Mathematica?

I need to buy 5 different things - and how does that look for me the user, I need 5 different binaries?

They really should sort that out, I know they are losing money because of this. I emailed their support once and ended up getting more confused.

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

#113

Post by iamtedd »

_alaya wrote: post #12
gnatman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, he writes often enough, for long enough, and being who he is, he's got to be a large part of everyone's training data.

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

#114

Post by ozim »

AJRF wrote: post #112

Every time I go to purchase a hobby license for Wolfram / Mathematica I give up because their product offering is the most convoluted i've seen in my life. Why can't I just pay some price and get the entire bundle of Wolfram One Cloud + API calls + LLM Assistant + This new MCP access + Mathematica? I need to buy 5 different things - and how does that look for me the user, I need 5 different binaries? They really shou…

Making a bad joke based mostly on my impression how Wolfram feels superior, but..

If you’re not smart enough to figure out how to buy it you probably won’t have much use of it anyway.

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

#115

Post by vitorsr »

jwr wrote: post #88

Lots of big words there, but can I now expose the local Mathematica (confusingly renamed Wolfram a while ago) that I'm paying for, through MCP to Claude Code? Because it seems I can't and all the big words are about buying something new.

Unsure if this is what the announcement is referring to:

https://resources.wolframcloud.com/PacletRepository/resource...

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

#116

Post by simianwords »

danpalmer wrote: post #111
simianwords wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you have just linked the fact that they have code executions but not proved that it is needed for strawberry problem. there are multiple ways to disprove this 1. GPT o1 was released and it never supported the tools and it easily solved the strawberry problem - it was named strawberry internally 2. you can run GPT 5.2-thinking in the API right now and deny access to any tools, it will still work 3. you can run deepsee…

Oh right you're very focused on specifically the strawberry problem. I just gave that as a throwaway example. It's a solution but not necessarily the solution for something that simple. My point was much more general, that code execution is a key part of these models ability to perform maths, analysis, and provide precise answers. It's not the only way, but a key way that's very efficient compared to more inference f…

I agree that tool usage dramatically improves the utility of LLM's. But it is absolutely not needed for the strawberry problem.

It can perform complicated arithmatic without tools - multiplying multiple 20 digit numbers, division and so on (to an extent).

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

#117

Post by jbotz »

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?

https://mathics.org/

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

#118

Post by adius »

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?

https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi

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

#119

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

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…

I think in practice it's less of a programming language and more of a scripting environment. It's like excel for math. There are many more people using it to produce mathematical results (like how excel is used to produce reports and graphs) than people who use it to produce programs.

This is why its not particularly problematic that it is closed source. Most people I've worked with who use it produce mathematical results with it that are fully checkable by hand.

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

#120

Post by auggierose »

oefrha wrote: post #83
kgwgk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some of that funding currently goes to private pockets Most (all?) of that funding goes to private pockets: researchers work for money, equipment costs money, etc.

It’s hard to distribute equipment, food and shelter at zero marginal cost. It’s easy to distribute software at zero marginal cost. So let’s start there.

No one is stopping you. Build it, then distribute it. You will find that as long as people need to pay for their living, there is no post-scarcity world in any domain, especially not the digital one.
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