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ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

writings.stephenwolfram.com

241–250 of 329 posts

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#241
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI becomes a really powerful corporation right now. Until reasonable alternatives are developed, in many professions you will be basically handicapped without it. And the cherry on top is that they have all inputs. These provide incomparably more data than e.g. google search queries. Not to mention they have a tool which excels at guessing user intention and interests.

What sort of professions? I think it might really help with writers’ block. But “handicapped without it” in “ many professions”? Without detailed support, this reads as a rather absurd and zealous statement.

Any profession which involves digesting, analysing and organising information will be heavily affected by GPT.

If you are the guy manually writing code to extract and interpret information from CSVs or articles, it might take you hours longer than the guy who gets the chatbot to do it in seconds.

I predict GPT will be a necessary tool to stay competitive in most middle class jobs within the next year

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WolframAlpha is still bad at natural language. I recently tried to get it to convert mpg to l/100km. I spent close to 10 minutes until I stumbled into a combination that gave the answer among a sea of useless conversions.

I don't doubt your experience, having been frustrated many times myself, but in case anyone is curious, my first and most obvious guess worked: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=convert+5+mpg+to+L%2Fkm

It’s per 100km. I tried a few prompts, wolfram didn’t get it right!

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Google's search engine was orders of magnitude ahead of everyone else's when it came out. Like it actually worked vs all the others that did some mediocre keyword matching and could be moderately useful if you were good with boolean operators. Gmail, which another poster described, was also mind blowing at the time. Google Maps, and the fact that you could scroll across a map smoothly was mind blowing at…

Google earth was super cool when it came out. Being able to spin a globe, find our house, visit any place in the world. Maybe it was less useful compare to maps, but definitely more fun.

Yeah I had forgotten until after I submitted that earth was an entirely separate project. There was a lot of other cool stuff. I remembered and tried to use linux.google.com a few weeks ago and found out it's no longer a thing.

Also Google labs, I remember playing with their set tool all the time. You add a few items of a set, and it added more. Ie 4-5 grunge bands and it will spit out 10 more.

I will say though more recently, when I first got in a car with Android Auto I was like I will never be able to live without this again. It may sound silly but just the fact that the time synced with my phone I was like take my money. Even more recently the call screen feature on the pixel 6 and 7 was just pure surprise and delight. I finally feel like I am the boss of my phone again. Google lens and translate are actually quite impressive but kind of niche use cases.

There were a lot of little things, Google desktop which was pretty cool for awhile and it kind of fulfilled what MS was trying to do with it's "Active Desktop."

My point being that maybe everyone (including myself) is a little harsh but google is still building interesting things. The pace seems to have slowed down though and they aren't leaps ahead of the pack anymore.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#244
post #219
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, as somebody who remembers Xerox's lethargy even in the 80s and 90s, that's both an incredibly apt comparison and shockingly accurate.

Google is a large conglomerate (Alphabet). So a big heterogeneous federation. If they managed this well, it'd could be much more long-lived than other corporations. Google itself could loose steam but other companies, e.g. DeepMind, could fill in the void. However, the founders seem not to care.

Although DeepMind made and improved AlphaGo, they did not produce ChatGPT. Just like Apple went to Xerox and saw the potential of innovations that Xerox was neglecting.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#245
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data you enter in Google Search is much more limited (at least it is for me). None of the other Google services are essential. (Google Search isn’t essential as well, but it’s a distinctive kind of service in that it isn’t practical to self-host.) With “WA” I guess you mean WhatsApp. For messaging, E2E encryption is now standard, which is not possible for AI services (barring huge breakthroughs in homomorphic enc…

Sorry, I should have specified WA means Wolfram Alpha. >barring huge breakthroughs in homomorphic encryption Actually this seems plausible to me without having to use those general purpose algorithms that cause a 1000000000x slowdown. For example, you can obscure the input to each matrix multiplication by shifting the input and outputs by a predetermined (user specific) constant. Maybe there are similar tricks for cr…

I’m pretty sure your query will effectively still be derivable on the server side, as it has to syntactically/semantically interact with the model. To truly disguise it, at least part of the model/weights would have to be transferred to the client side (so that the server doesn’t learn the adjustment), which would in turn leak the model.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please anyone willing to answer as if you might be speaking to a golden retriever: How important is a "lead" in this space? I have been comparing ChatGPT and Bard a lot the last two days because this is all very fascinating, and from my datapoint-of-one perspective, it feels like ChatGPT is way, way ahead. Then I start to wonder is this because ChatGPT captivated our attention so much the last few months that they've…

Bard opened to a US-only audience. For being the engine in applications that might propel an LLM ahead of the others, I fail to see that this would be advantageous for opening markets and greeting new customers. As an example [of the contrary], I noticed Swedish Klarna among the partners that OpenAI revealed when announcing their plug-in API today.

Bard speaks only English + is very limited, so that explains much why it's not widely deployed worldwide.

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely this paradigm cannot scale up indefinitely. It doesn't have to. It just has to scale up long enough to start causing real societal problems, if it isn't already there. Also it's kind of annoying to see you dismiss any of this criticism as 'alarmist' in thread after thread when if you look back a year at best the state that we are in today was said to be at least several years away by the same people who are…

I didn’t dismiss anything. I didn’t say anything was alarmist. Please don’t put words in my mouth. You didn’t say anything about societal problems. You wondered if the growth will ever stop, and I tried my best in good faith to give the reasons why I believe that it will. If the question is “when will the models be powerful enough to cause societal problems”, then that is a completely different question and I think t…

> I didn’t dismiss anything. I didn’t say anything was alarmist. Please don’t put words in my mouth.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35276186

"We’re still decades from AGI in my opinion, and the Chicken Little types ought to pace themselves, is all I’m saying. "

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#248
post #156

"It turns out... the singularity was our knowledge merging to form the AI."

> "It turns out... the singularity was our knowledge merging to form the AI."

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

~ Carl Sagan

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of professions? I think it might really help with writers’ block. But “handicapped without it” in “ many professions”? Without detailed support, this reads as a rather absurd and zealous statement.

Any profession which involves digesting, analysing and organising information will be heavily affected by GPT. If you are the guy manually writing code to extract and interpret information from CSVs or articles, it might take you hours longer than the guy who gets the chatbot to do it in seconds. I predict GPT will be a necessary tool to stay competitive in most middle class jobs within the next year

But how can you verify what you find?

Re: ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty hyperbolic. Great products that were much better than what they replaced or competed with, but "beyond wild dreams of millions of people"? You'd think they cured cancer in 2003 or something...

I thought this was rather tame as far as Wolfram announcements go. Last time he claimed to have discovered the fundamental rules underpinning the entire universe.

Ha. Conway’s game of life really had an impact on boomers. Never knew why. (Wolfram, though, is a helluva guy… the book was damn interesting. I mock him in the same way that one might mock Einstein’s hair-do.)
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