Having been both in academia and industry, to me Stephen always sounds too academic for business, but for academia, a mix of too "industry" and a crank.
Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
161–170 of 188 posts
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#162Having been both in academia and industry, to me Stephen always sounds too academic for business, but for academia, a mix of too "industry" and a crank.
If he'd failed at his endeavors and didn't have a very successful company, that might be interesting insight. Since that didn't happen, it feels like you're fronting with your judgement in spite of its irrelevance to his arc.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#163There'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.
To save others a search, here's the podcast with Wolfram. Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics - https://podbay.fm/p/sean-carrolls-mindscape-science-society-... (2hr 40min) I'm a fan of his work and person too. Not a fanatic or evangelical level, but I do think he's one of the more historically relevant computer scientists and philosophers working today. I can overlook his occasional a…
Same here. I've found the "me me me" a bit off-putting over the years, but can't deny that he is a genuinely smart, interesting, and forward thinking person. I especially enjoyed his writings on measuring every aspect of his life [1].
Also Wolfram (person and company) don't seem to be stodgy and stuck in old ways. At least as an outside observer (I'm not a mathematician, nor do I use Wolfram's main tools), seem to handle new trends with their own unique contributions to augment those trends:
Wolfram Alpha was a genuinely useful and good tool, perfect for the times.
These tools will actually further supercharge LLMs in certain use cases. They've provided multiple ways to adopt them.
Looking forward to see what people will do with this stuff.
1: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-ana...
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
People need to eat. That's the main flaw in open source. Yes, its a great idea, but why am I working a real job to eat, and spending nights and weekends on a project just as a hobby. Science doesn't progress very fast using the 'hobby' model of funding. Unless you are rich, and it is a hobby, much like Wolfram Alpha was. He wanted to play with math/physics stuff and was rich enough to self fund.
But science does progress on the free sharing of information. Academics get paid to produce stuff that's free for everyone all the time. No one is contesting that people who build these libraries should be compensated. The argument is that if more scientific tools and knowledge are freely (or cheaply) available you lower the barrier to entry to experiment and play with those tools/concepts, which means more people wi…
I agree. Just free/open data, does cost someone.
In science, it is the government that funds a lot of research. Specifically because the free market does fail at this.
A lot of tech success is built on top of government funding. In this analogy, the funding for people to eat while producing the free stuff for others to found tech startups upon.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
He got famous solving quantum field theory problems
he seems to think his times better spent on software than science it seems. i take it he didnt really crack anything of worth on the physics side then?
To be fair, he's been trying, he's a big fan of cellular automaton.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#166I 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 there already Maxima which is several decades old?
Maxima, Axiom, SymPy, and many more CAS systems exist. They don't run Mathematica code, so if that's your goal they don't help.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#167I know this marks me out as a very specific and fairly derided kind of nerd, but I’m really excited to see what new features will be included in Mathematica 15 which is presumed to be launching fairly soon.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#168There'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.
We got a realist over here!!! I repeat: a realist in the house!
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#169For the low, low price of $5/month.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Imagine if 10 years ago Wolfram software was opensourced. They would have lost ten years of profits and development would have slowed.
Or accelerated, since development would have ceased to be restricted to Wolfram's employees
If that was really going to be the case then we wouldn't be having this discussion, there would already be an open source streaking ahead.