Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

WED

3:30PM ET

This Week

History of Science and Technology Q&A

Next Week Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A

FRI

3:30PM ET

This Week

Science and Technology Q&A for Kids (& Others)

Next Week Future of Science and Technology Q&A

UPCOMING: APRIL 16, 2024 @ 4:00PM ET

Live CEOing 784: Language Design in Wolfram Language »

Science &
Technology Q&A for Kids & Others

Weekly ask-me-anything about science & technology

History of Science and Technology Q&A

Biweekly ask-me-anything about history of science & technology

Future of Science &
Technology Q&A

Biweekly ask-me-anything about the future of science & technology

Live
CEOing

Behind the scenes in real-life software design

Business, Innovation &
Managing Life Q&A

Biweekly ask-me-anything about business, innovation, & managing life

Research Working Sessions

Behind the scenes of previous and current work in various areas of science and research

Personal Video
Worklogs

Raw recordings of work getting done

Public &
Special Events

Timely explorations, special events and public addresses

Podcasts

Selected recordings of Q&A and other events

Recent Livestreams

Live CEOing #783:

Live CEOing Ep 783: Design Review of BioMolecule and BioMoleculePlot3D »

with Stephen Wolfram | Live CEOing Ep 783: Design Review of BioMolecule and BioMoleculePlot3D

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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (April 12, 2024) »

1 hour 21 minutes

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What features will humans evolve in the future? Will we one day be able to look at the Sun with our naked eye? What is there to say about the future of philosophy? It feels like such an ancient study. If empirical evidence indicates that there is a finite, digital, physical multiverse, then will the practice and philosophy of mathematics undergo huge changes? Are all philosophers logicians? Will we ever find a cure for the common cold? Could that end up messing up our immune systems because they've always fought colds? What about the possibility of injecting tiny computers into our blood cells? Topically, you may remember a boom in nanotech ~20 years or so ago, including nano-robotics research labs and a subsequent bust of a sort. Where is that nanotech boom/bust cycle now and looking ahead? For nanotech to really take off will require new foundational building blocks, mostly from a convergence of biotechnology and electronics research. We see glimpses of that from DNA sequencing/printing. What do you foresee in terms of substrates of the future for computation? In the medium term? Long term? Does the success of one field sometimes slow down other research fields? View Less »

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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (April 10, 2024) »

1 hour 14 minutes

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What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs? Can children be successful in business? Is it good to have variety in my resume when applying for jobs? How valued are long-term employees of one company vs. an applicant who has had many different jobs? How does one generate a succession plan for a company? Do you think the software market is over-saturated? It feels like there are many untapped innovations in areas like materials sciences and hardware. What's the best way to get funding for a physics-based R&D company? I am starting one and need help. What are some benefits to an internship? Is the AI development just a short-term fashion, like in the 80s? Will owning/running private businesses ever be superseded as an economic form? I think the best advice for young entrepreneurs is "Don't do it." If they do it anyway, that's real entrepreneurship. What would you say to individuals who are interested foremost in making a difference in the world rather than a monetary incentive? How would you weigh the choices between pursuing traditional academia, working on the cutting edge within the private sector or pursuing research in one's own time independently (assuming their life allows such freedom)? How about setting up non- or not-for-profit R&D? How much do you think businesses will have to adjust to account for AI workers if they take off? What about one-person corporations? Zero-person corporations? It seems to me that public libraries should offer access to journals as well as books. Thoughts? There is already an inundation of LLM-written, peer-reviewed papers, adding to your point. In Sweden, we have a book bus that drives around with books to suburban areas. View Less »

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Science & Technology Q&A for Kids & Others:

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and Others) [Episode 143] »

1 hour 13 minutes

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Can you explain eclipse prediction like I'm in middle school? High school? College? Is it possible to view an Eclipse from space? Do astronauts on the space station see anything during eclipses? Related to the eclipse, it is interesting that the Moon always shows the same side to Earth. Why is that? (I've heard about commensurate frequencies, but I'm not sure about the origin of this fact.) How are orbits in the solar system so stable over time? I wonder if it would have any effect if the Moon did rotate with respect to the Earth? If the Moon were spinning fast, it would probably still have a liquid core, I think? If the Moon were to be broken apart, leading to a debris field impacting Earth, what models exist to predict the scale of these impacts and their potential effects on global climate, ecosystems and people? Is predicting eclipses harder than predicting the motions of planets or comets? Can LLMs do math? When will the AIs start colonizing space? When we have large models of all sorts of other stuff, will LLMs' primary role not actually be as the interpreters between humans and our tools? Can't we look into the brain to find out what types of transformers or even other things we need in LLMs? View Less »

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Live CEOing #782:

Live CEOing Ep 782: Design Review of AssessmentFunction Comparison Methods »

with Stephen Wolfram | 35 minutes

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Live CEOing #781:

Live CEOing Ep 781: Language Design in the Wolfram Language [% Modernization] »

with Stephen Wolfram | 1 hour 25 minutes

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History of Science & Technology Q&A:

History of Science and Technology Q&A (April 3, 2024) »

2 hours 12 minutes

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Is there a directionality to science and technology? Has anyone sort of applied the hacker mentality to the Antikythera mechanism to figure out what else you could use it for? What kind of uses could a time-traveling von Neumann figure out? What is the likelihood that ancient tech we've discovered had vastly different uses than what we believe? Southeast Asia is terrible for archeology because you can make almost anything from bamboo: tens of thousands of years ago, people obviously used wood etc., but only stone remains. What does that say going forward, with our fast-rotting bits, in contrast with stone or wood, or even paper? Any thoughts on the ancient dodecahedra? Do you have one? Who started research on the periodic tables? Can you discuss a bit about its development? What motivated the advent of the fast Fourier transform algorithm? What was its creator wanting to solve? How advanced did analog computers get before we moved to digital computers? Was there any debate on whether we shouldn't move to digital at the time? Why did modern formal logic take so long to develop historically, compared to other branches of mathematics or physical sciences? What explains the delay until the mid-nineteenth century? Is there any knowledge in physics today that has been influenced by ancient texts like the Vedas etc.? View Less »

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Live CEOing #780:

Live CEOing Ep 780: Design Review of LLMFunctions features »

with Stephen Wolfram | 40 minutes

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Live CEOing #779:

Live CEOing Ep 779: Design Review of Compiler Features »

with Stephen Wolfram | 1 hour 21 minute

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Live CEOing #778:

Live CEOing Ep 778: Design Review of DiffTools »

with Stephen Wolfram | 1 hour 6 minutes

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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (March 29, 2024) »

1 hour 8 minutes

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Regarding the April 8 eclipse, what should we know about the weather? What if it's cloudy or raining? What will the future of predicting eclipses look like? Will we be able to move the Moon to keep eclipses? The Moon gets further away because of friction in the oceans from tides, so could we play with that mechanic? I've seen a couple articles about attempting to build trains on the Moon. Would that be useful? Should we expect really unusual emergent properties from LLMs as we scale up the data more and more? It seems erroneous to think it's a "more data" question; it's the opposite—"less data" (more generalization/transferability and efficiency) via integration of a "symbolic" framework/accelerator. Human senses capture an absolutely tiny sliver of what's going on. Would additional (strong) senses lead to bigger brains or more languages? Is human consciousness one-dimensional? Perhaps it's not so surprising that training AI on games is useful, when humans learn through play in early life. There is an interesting article about how the requirements of ChatGPT-7 would be massive, like 5 Gorge Dams or half the world's computers, and there isn't enough training data. What does it say about logic (and set/type theories) as a so-called formal language that LLMs can't just trivially do logic and reasoning? What's the best way to pass computational representation to language models, plain text or embeddings? View Less »

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Future of Science & Technology Q&A:

Future of Science and Technology Q&A (March 22, 2024) »

1 hour 6 minutes

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Do you have any plans, and when can we expect to see a S. Wolfram AI chatbot with voice? Do you think each AI iteration of the person would be similar at the start and then diverge in personality/intelligence as they continued to "live" and develop? Are you comfortable with the average quality and correctness of AI-generated answers and commentary? Due to the success of nature-inspired computing, I am really wondering if like our best bet is creating full-on human replicas, meaning similar learning experiences/processes... I like the architecture of having many bots with like a base that confer and like upload their findings to a global knowledgebase, then disperse on like new assignments or what have you after returning. Do you think human brains compress data in a lossy way, and will future AI brains also have to use lossy compression methods to be more human like? Or would AI perfect memory be more desirable? Could an element printer theoretically work, e.g. one feeds it with carbon atoms and it prints out an arbitrary element? Can you explain the quantum LLMs idea, and what advantage exists in applying multi-computation, if any, to LLMs? What would an AI look like that is rewarded based on questioning rather than answering? What do you think will happen when we understand prime numbers to their fullest? And when we can translate this knowledge to AI? View Less »

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