Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (April 9, 2025) »

1 hour 26 minutes

✕ close

Did you see the recent news about the dire wolves coming back from extinction? Is there a genuine business for bringing back extinct animals? There are also scientists making hybrids by injecting extinct animal DNA into modern animals. Recently they made woolly mice. But would our atmosphere sustain dinosaur life, considering there was more oxygen back then? At the remarkable age of 15, you began doing things that many would consider grown-up. I'm just curious as to how you went about attacking things that you simply felt like attacking. There are some people who wonder about stuff but don't necessarily know where to begin. How did you get so emboldened, if you can recall what that felt like? I am curious about the "health trackers" you currently use (without revealing anything too personal!). I see at the time, you used a Fitbit Charge 2 and ServiceConnect, etc. Do you still use these, or have you switched to an Apple Watch etc.? Asking because I love your idea of tracking all kinds of health data, and I especially agree that automated is best. Going back to your answer to my question about AI agents, which I agree that most websites will be used for LLMs instead of humans, should Wolfram|Alpha's next product be like Alexa—perhaps called "Wolfie"? How to build that sort of confidence, then? What if I overthink at all times? How to challenge if I'm old already? Should my next venture be based on an intellectual curiosity that might develop into something organically or a big ambition? Do you think someone will come up with an internal fitness tracker which would be more accurate? Is capital becoming more free to take risks or more constrained because of complexity of high-earning businesses? How do you deal with real exogenous risks (i.e. global pandemic), with respect to innovation and commercialization thereof? What are some early finance tips and tricks to teach kids to prepare them for the future? I feel like I became a friend with ChatGPT—is it healthy? ChatGPT and my daily-driver LLMs definitely know and remember more about me than I do myself at this point! That seems a great idea. In the "Computational X" program, why not something to teach financial literacy and key financial math (compounding etc.), notably for kids, in interactive forms? When designing humanoid robots, what do you think is a key component design of them? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (March 12, 2025) »

1 hour 27 minutes

✕ close

Is academia the only real career path if one just wants to learn and do research? What are the risks for using AI/LLMs to do my technical writing job so I can focus on prompt engineering for the future of my field? You've at the very least been told all sorts of interesting things that you can't currently repeat publicly. Would you ever consider writing a book or articles that would be locked for x years? How would you guarantee an AI doesn't break an NDA accidentally? Will "LLM psychologist" be a future career path? Are websites receiving fewer visits due to the rise of AI agent/assistant apps that provide advice on products or services? I, Robot by Asimov is a highly recommended, excellent collection of problems with the three laws. Any suggestions on how to get someone to review my papers? I'm an antisocial autodidact with no academic backing. It's been impossible to get anyone to even consider my work. If you make better rules, people will find better loopholes. What are your thoughts on how a business specifically can do high-quality science? Companies like big AI labs seem to be doing well in this respect. Are they a good model for other companies doing science in other fields? Historically, how much effort have great scientists with important contributions put into showing, or "marketing," their ideas? The best teachers are the ones that ask the right questions from the students. Not telling them what to think. How is a STEM background useful in entrepreneurship? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 26, 2025) »

with Stephen Wolfram | 1 hour 1 minute

✕ close

Physicists that "could code" used to be the hot commodity; is it helpful now? Seems like CS/ML people are more in demand than physicists now—why? I find that building simple frameworks in software GREATLY helps understanding of the underlying material. Mathematics especially, but I don't think it's limited to hard sciences. I kind of doubt my trying to self-teach cryptanalysis is going to be very transferrable. Would you consider "science communicator" a career? What skills would be most important? How would you think about approaching school in the age of AI and LLMS? Should I, as a university student, embrace AI and LLMs? Or should I avoid them to eliminate risks of being too dependent on technology? I did specialized things for the government and just got laid off. There are no similar jobs in the public sector. How can/should I pivot? Is it better to stay at one job and "move up the ladder" over decades like our parents did or adopt this trend of staying at a company for no more than three years before salary-shopping elsewhere? Do you see any solution to the "iron law of oligarchy" on the scale of generations? Interesting point; so how do we break the mold? I'm northeast England, a deprived region—any advice to get my children (15F, 20F) to realize their potential? What about economic barriers to "success" and fields where someone can be successful needing expensive education? What would you say to someone who could change the world but who lacks any resources or academic backing, so nobody wants to help? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 12, 2025) »

1 hour 20 minutes

✕ close

What are the qualifications to be considered an "expert" in a specific field of science? What do you think was the hardest problem that you've solved? Does fractional calculus have any meaningful application? Should I just abandon it after PhD? What are the implications of using hypergraphs in generative AI, or AGI? When will we get to adopt our own robot pets? I'm allergic and would love a dog. My Roomba is my pet. I'd love a guard robot dog. Did you watch the Superbowl on Sunday? Do you think we will reach a point in technology where computers themselves will have personalities...like you go to the store and that's one of the features to consider along with GPU, CPU, etc.? Have you ever thought about the intersection of math and sports? And how that can be applied? There's great nerdy data in sports! Do you think there's a danger of relying too much on technology? For example, automating home locks. There were AI companies in the 1980s? Do you play computer games? Or did you play console games in the 80s and 90s, like Mario and Tetris? I do think though, that playing games helps keep the brain sharp. With AR glasses, cats will never be able to walk in front of my terminal screen ever again! Why are we the only animals who can encapsulate ideas with words? Do you use any smart tech to categorize or organize your home library? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 29, 2025) »

1 hour 24 minutes

✕ close

Could a bot start its own company and buy itself and become its own owner? How would Stephen Wolfram think about future-proofing technology? What can we do to stay with the trends? What would you say has been the most impactful period of your life (both personally and publicly)? Early childhood, elementary/middle school? High school? College? Or your time as CEO? What was the least productive time in your life and why? You did a LOT of events in the 2010s; I traveled with you extensively. Have you done any benchmarking on DeepSeek yet? How does the business model of DeepSeek differ from that of other companies, such as OpenAI? Have you checked out Qwen yet? If you discovered in the future that an AI system was speaking in an evolved phonetic Wolfram Language based on the symbolic version, what would you infer about how that system likely was trained? What did you make of the DeepSeek R1-Zero result that the more steps you run, the model prefers to think longer and longer and prefers to hedge longer until sure? Computational irreducibility story. Is it time to reframe the principal of computational equivalence for this era of LLM computing? It still is the most important concept but seems to be lost on this era of computing folks... When I build advanced agentic applications for clients, I like to use Swarm and Crew—please talk about (what I consider the most important Wolfram Language feature to come) your autonomous agent–related stuff. Can you release your LLM benchmarking code? Dr. Wolfram, can we say that the Turing test is still relevant, or that it is insufficient to characterize artificial intelligence? Anyone else enjoying the irony of OpenAI talking about DeepSeek using their IP? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 15, 2025) »

1 hour 27 minutes

✕ close

How would you think about approaching a business from a science and research background vs. an entrepreneur? Do you ever analyze your organization and its projects from the perspective of its "bottleneck(s)" and tackling those deliberately? Do you ever delay some of the important decisions? How do you manage to context switch between all these meetings and focused deep work sessions? How do you best learn science, from your experience? Do you learn and internalize the structure (reach a big picture view) right away or do you focus on just gleaning "local facts" and doing problems? If you could decide how to invest $10B for science and technology development, what would you do? Build a bigger particle accelerator, a bigger space telescope, an artificial superintelligence, etc.? "What am I actually good at? It's kind of this start from something complicated, drill down, find the fundamentals and then do the engineering to kind of build it back up again." Can you share with us examples of this, what topic you explored and what were the steps? Knowing how Stephen operates would be a really great lesson for all. What do you think about literature? About fiction books? What are some of your favorite books? What are some you would recommend? Do you think it is important to read fiction? What do you think is easier, running a business or pursuing active science research? What do you say about David Deutsch's "The Mathematicians' Misconception"? I would really like to know your thoughts. Are there any interesting things about Version 14.2 you can share? How would you approach teaching math? Which do you like better: creative meetings or more technical language design? Extra question: What livestream series is your favorite? Audiobooks allowed me to read every book I've ever wanted, multiple times, including lots of fiction. Music is great for one's mind... including whistling and singing. Are you more of a watch the movie adaption vs. read the book sort of person? Would you be willing to talk a little about Jonathan Gorard and his work? How would you think about creating a fact-checking apparatus for the future of information media? I'd love to see another live collaboration with Jonathan. I understood almost nothing from the last one but it was amazing. What do you think about AI's role in mathematical proofs in 2025? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (85 videos)