The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Latest Episodes:

History of Science & Technology Q&A (February 8, 2023) Nov 03, 2023

Show notes

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

What would you say is the most important human-designed algorithm of all time? - Historically, who has led the trends in science, practitioners or academics? - Did Richard Feynman really think that "philosophy is baloney"? Did you ever discuss non-physics subjects? - If simulation becomes sufficiently good in the future, will it cause experimental scientists to be out of a job? - How did we go about solving the goat problem? - According to the history of science, what might be the ratio of the number of minor paradigm shifts to the number of major paradigm shifts? - What was the fifth class of cellular automata that almost was, which you mentioned in your personal history paper? - Has an idea like the ruliad existed before, or is this a novel object? - Neural networks show that combining two seemingly unrelated fields of research can produce great results, but our academic and business cultures are focused more on specialization. Your thoughts? - What would a modern analog computer look like today?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [February 3, 2023] Oct 27, 2023

Show notes

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: How do we predict weather? - Basically, weather forecasting is an excellent example of computational irreducibility. - Can you discuss your recent blog on the second law of thermodynamics?

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (February 1, 2023) Oct 27, 2023

Show notes

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Congratulations on the recent blog post! Can you talk about the process of writing a blog post like this? Why did you decide to do a three-part series? - Congratulations! Refreshing. Great timing, as thermodynamics is now used in generative AI models, i.e. nonequilibrium thermodynamics. - What are your thoughts on salaries and compensation, especially for virtual/remote companies that employ people from different locations? - I really like the way you define different writing styles for different projects. What led you to do that? How do you define the limits of an article or book and go through the writing process? - I find that when I write something up and I have to back up all my assertions, I reveal what I should've been investigating in the first place. - How should one go about learning how to split equity when founding a company? How do you know if you are giving too much or too little? - You said you can understand French. Are there any other languages you're familiar with? Are there other languages you would like to learn or wish you would've learned? - Do you recommend exposing children to a second language? Is it harder to learn another language as you get older?

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [January 27, 2023] Oct 20, 2023

Show notes

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Do you think it's possible to sustain life on Mars? How far into the future do you see this happening? - Maybe biological switches would change everything for a biological machine. - Could you explain the fundamental principles of biology? - Aren't neurons the biological analog of switches? - Can machine learning help solve inverse scattering problems where the forward scattering problem is highly nonlinear? - How do x-rays work to see only the bones and ignore skin? - I think bone opacity also comes down to water contents (there is just more water in tissue). - Can those x-rays be used for automatic detection of changes within the molecule structure of crystallized solids as well? - Do you think ecology will play an important role in understanding molecular computation? - Ecology is a complex system. Physics is easy: just analyze a single particle's or body's motion. Ecology has vast interconnections and mechanisms.

History of Science & Technology Q&A (January 25, 2023) Oct 20, 2023

Show notes

Questions include: Historically, what are some of the most prominent developments in the twentieth-century history of software design? - I watched the recent NASA rocket launch and wondered what's new in the past 60 years. - Why did American English develop common words for every third order of magnitude (million, billion, trillion)? Other languages seem to have different common words, like lakh in Hindi for 100,000. - I remember a comment from an old programmer saying the first time they saw a screen used with a computer was in the movie 2001. - Why is ChatGPT blowing up now when GPT-3 was known in 2020 and GPT-2 in 2019? - How much do you think real science and technology are shaped by the ideas from science fiction? - The thing about ChatGPT is that it uses the same architecture as GPT-3 with the same number of parameters. The fact that a fine tuning can create such a leap in capability suggests that we are in a hardware overhang. - Has there been any technology in history that's been perfected (e.g. the wheel), or is there always room for improvement? - Printers. Paper jammed 30 years ago, paper jams today. - Let's not ask the AI to design a new type of paperclip. - Paper jams happen today, but paper itself has become irrelevant. Such is the case with technology. Old technology doesn't get better, it gets replaced. - When and why was dark energy hypothesized? - Once we get 3D nano-replicators, we won't need roads; we can just teleport from place to place.

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [January 20, 2023] Oct 13, 2023

Show notes

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you talk a bit about Pangaea? How do continents shift? Is it possible to reform Pangaea? Is there technology that could prevent this? - How does ChatGPT work? - Could you say that Chat GPT has made a graph of the space of words or ideas? - I'd love to see a thesaurus based on vectors into semantic space, so you could ask it to give you a word with a meaning close to "A" but heading in the direction of "B." - How well does ChatGPT handle slang or figures of speech? Does it understand text as literal, or is it capable of picking up these notes? - Could it be that ChatGPT isn't accurate because its training data is text, which may or may not correspond to the real world? Shouldn't we use only real-world data, such as sensory information of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell? - With all the new "AI" tools rolling out, what do you think will be the effect on "truth" and "facts" as we know them? - Does ChatGPT's ability to mimic emotions means that it is able to feel anything, and how much consciousness does it have? - Do you believe physics boundaries need to be coded explicitly, or do you think enough data will result in the model learning principles? - How does a neural network experience time? How do all these threads of computation combine to form a whole from its parts?

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (January 18, 2023) Oct 13, 2023

Show notes

Questions include: What is the one question (or all questions) a CEO must be asking himself every day? - Why did you choose walking as your main exercise? Did you try other modalities? Is there a scientific reason or just personal preference? Did you do any analysis regarding which exercises deliver the best benefits for the time/energy spent? - Have you thought about using ChatGPT to help you write a fiction book? I saw recently someone used AI to create a children's book in the time frame of a weekend. - What do you do when you are feeling that you are lost or unmotivated and not having a clear vision into what should be done next in your business endeavors? - I'm very impressed at how well you express yourself in these videos. Do you think writing has helped you in this regard? - What are your thoughts for the coming wave of founders starting generative AI companies? - I feel like ChatGPT and the art AIs will be able to make full-blown movies algorithmically. - I've used ChatGPT for writing technical instructions and procedures at work. I really dislike doing them myself, and GPT gives an excellent first cut with English better than I could write it. - I think you would have to include that you used chat as an aid for the email. - How do I focus on a problem? There are so many aspects in literature and following cross-referencing can be overwhelming. - How do you deal with distractions and not get overstimulated by external forces? How do you stay focused on hard tasks? - Can I ask about "team building," particularly with highly technical types of peoples (scientists, engineers, savants)? - What is your advice for someone employed full time in the industry doing something else to do research in another area? - How did you find out that you would excel at physics and computational physics? - Will you open source the Stephen Wolfram bot? - Do you have an overview of all the projects you have in your company? What do you think about too many versus too little projects? - Do you think it is a good idea to treat coding/programming as a sport, i.e. the same as football, e.g. score a goal, become famous?

History of Science & Technology Q&A (January 11, 2023) Oct 06, 2023

Show notes

Questions include: What could Aristotle have accomplished if he had a modern machine-learning system? Could he have discovered logic? - Didn't Noam Chomsky also do some work in the intersection between math/logic and language? I wondered if language models are based on that at all? - Will the next generation of ChatGPT or VoiceGPT have any negative recourse, especially when it comes to impersonation? - A similar Chomsky idea is "can a submarine swim?" In English it can't, and in Japanese it can. - Do you think AI presents an existential risk? If so, how could we mitigate it? - How do you think Einstein or even Stephen Hawking would react to ChatGPT? Are there any figures in science who predicted this development? - Given what we have learned from AI models, does learning from history allow us to better predict the future? Does modeling the past imply modeling the future? - Ants are structured distinctly enough and that can lead to immediate conclusions on many levels.

Science & Technology Q&A for Kids (and others) [January 6, 2023] Oct 06, 2023

Show notes

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Is it possible to produce large amounts of crude oil artificially by manipulating chemical kinetics? - How is the distance to a distant galaxy determined? - What industries do you think will be most disrupted by ChatGPT and Midjourney AI applications? - Thoughts on integrating the Wolfram interface with ChatGPT? - An automatic nonsense/false detector would be a interesting tool to have. - With generative images, Dall-E needs to be able to recycle its output image for incremental improvement. - Chat GPT will edit your e-mails into publishable books. - What are some of the most interesting ChatGPT prompts you've come up with that can aid in everyday life? - I've used ChatGPT to help give me ideas for movie scripts. - Couldn't the detector be used as a way to make the output of ChatGPT actually be coherent? Isn't the detector just the necessary component for ChatGPT to learn from its mistakes? - How could a language model be integrated with a symbolic system? - Stephen, do you think ChatGPT is over-hyped? Chomsky chuckled about the literally 60 years he's heard we're "on the verge of an AI Revolution." - Instead of training on text, wouldn't training on the senses that we use, such as video and audio be better? I suspect that a model that can predict the next video frame will be as intelligent as a human. Video contains text inside itself as well as other degrees of freedom that humans have access to. - Do you log all of your keystrokes, etc with the expectation that you will provide this information to an AI to try to understand your thought patterns? - I've used it to construct a 365-day nutrition plan I'm just having my first breakfast based on it!

What We've Learned from NKS 20 Years Later: The Making and Current State of NKS [Part 3] Sep 29, 2023

Show notes

In this episode of "What We've Learned from NKS", Stephen Wolfram is celebrating the 20th anniversary of A New Kind of Science with a look at the making of and current state of NKS in an ongoing livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/12aAqLklA

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Related Podcasts

1

2

3

4

5

6