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?
Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
81–90 of 188 posts
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#82Every 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?
SageMath? I never used it but I hear it passing by as alternative.
(And this one popped in Google as second when I just searched; https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core)
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#84Every 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 the beginning.
I think one of the basic problems is that the core language is just not very performant on modern cpus, so not the best tool for real-world applications.
Again- maybe i’m missing something?
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#85There'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.
Meh, the scientific community already took a lot of public money and turned that into foss code competing with matlab, wolfram and others.
Matlab definitely took a big hit in the last decade and is losing against the python numpy stack. Others will follow.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#86Every 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?
SageMath? I never used it but I hear it passing by as alternative. (And this one popped in Google as second when I just searched; https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core )
SageMath is much broader than SymPy, by integrating a lot of third-party niche tools that have been developed for decades, often as C libraries.
Unfortunately, SageMath is not directly usable as a Python package.
That's where passagemath [0] comes in, making the rich ecosystem of SageMath available to Python devs, one package at a time.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#87LLMs 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.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#88Lots 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.
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#89Is mathematica code in the pre or post training set?
Re: Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
He live streams the (internal) Wolfram Alpha product meetings on YouTube. It's really interesting to watch, I've been a fly on the wall for years.
I tried finding this but couldn't find them on youtube. Can you please share the link for one of the videos?
It's under the Live tab of Wolfram's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@WolframResearch/streams
Sessions are called Live CEOing, e.g.: