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

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 22, 2021) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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Can you use Wolfram Language to log on to a website with a username and password and read data from that website? Will computational chemistry/biochemistry programs (AlphaFold2?) be accurate enough in their predictions to completely dominate private R&D to reduce the costs and durations of expensive wet lab experimentation? When did you first decide to hire people at Wolfram Research? How did you recruit and evaluate them? What have you learned about hiring since then? Have you ever authentically read and replied to an unsolicited email if someone has an important idea for Mathematica and/or Wolfram Language? Do you have developers that work in a large variety of topics (changing monthly, perhaps), or are most in a "fixed" position/topic? When you reach the level you do with Wolfram Research, what steps do you undertake to ensure that you continue to innovate and don't lose ground to your competitors, and that you don't make the wrong business decisions? As someone with a technical background, how do you maintain a holistic overview of your company? For instance, do you better attempt to understand the company's financial books? What is your workout routine? How do you balance time being creative (for projects) with the everyday necessary work? At the start of crypto projects, there is always this battle between centralization and decentralization. You need an amount of centralization in the beginning to get things going. How long should a project be given before you let in the masses? Do you have an opinion concerning Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger? Do you use rules similar to those in cellular automata when you manage your company or your company's projects? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 8, 2021) »

1 hour 39 minutes

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Has Wolfram Research, Inc. done any research on and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? A question about your personal data logging: Have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any machine learning on that data? When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? What do you do to keep up your energy—supplements, omega-3 oils, etc.? What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? I work from 9am to 9pm in programming/math. I feel it's fine, but people say I work too much and that I should give myself a break. Should I listen? When does your working day end? Do you listen to music while working? Do you advise young professionals to "play the game," as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial settings? Do you respect people who take this approach? What do you spend your personal money on? Do you ever treat yourself to something nice, like jewelry, a fine dinner, etc.? Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbors? How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? What's your opinion on company acquisition? Has Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how do you quickly integrate an acquired company? Here's a question. My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise him to learn/do that would be worth doing? In building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that the current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/trees/AST from >30 years ago) is in need of a rethink? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 10, 2021) »

1 hour 27 minutes

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How do you plan and track your product roadmaps? How far in advance do you plan? Do you decide to go to bed based on the time or once you finish a piece of work? Or do you like to leave pieces of work open to sleep on them? What impact is China's energy crisis going to have on manufacturing? Are you worried about inflation of the US dollar? How do you not worry about larger macroeconomic events and just focus on business? How is your ERP replacement project that was mentioned a year ago going? Has anyone built a computer yet that is good at programming other computers? Do you agree that a life unexamined is not worth living? What would you like to see younger/newer programmers focus on? Do you think that the computer science community is focusing too much on video games, dating apps, etc.? To be creative, do I need to know how to change people's beliefs? There are many people in this world with many creative ideas, though how probable is it that I am the one to prove a science like no other? Do you think the current democracies are the apex of history, or do better systems to organize societies have to come? Maybe this is too personal, but have you ever experienced anxiety or any other mental health problems in relation with managing a business and your time? Why should one start a startup when computer scientists are paid well in already-existing companies? Is this why Professor Feynman insisted on explaining neutrons to plant workers? I just graduated college in business management, but fell in love with mathematics and computer science during my senior year. Is it foolish to go back and get another undergraduate degree? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (October 27, 2021) »

1 hour 7 minutes

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What's the best way to build a personal dashboard? You proudly say you have three children. Elon Musk has seven. What is your opinion on the number of kids? Have you and Peter Thiel ever crossed paths or interacted? You seem to be the "poster child" for a lot of his public ideologies and convictions, but some of your core ideas challenge his. I'd like to know what Stephen thinks of the Seasteading Institute too. Do you think it's OK to edit the DNA of your potential kid for the better? Would you consider yourself a risk taker, or are you more risk averse? What's that red book on your bookshelf? Is messaging authors a good way to learn background information? Have you ever thought about going on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast? Your podcasts with Lex Fridman were great. Were those podcasts also helpful to you in some way? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 29, 2021) »

1 hour 1 minute

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Do you believe billionaires should exist? Are you one? Why do billionaires make space rockets? Do you have a fancy car? Or a boat? At least three! Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos? How do you determine if your time is being well-spent? How many computers do you own? Do you build them yourself? I have a 9–5 job and graduated in physics, but work as an analyst. I'm tired when coming home and want to learn more skills. Any advice? Do you perceive yourself as an altruist? Do you still systematically learn new science by textbooks? Why is it so hard for independent learners outside of institutions to get access to decent tools and classes? It is hard not to default to Python because of the lack of financing. How is the landscape of investing in technology startups changing? Where do you fit in? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 15, 2021) »

1 hour 42 minutes

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How do you start a mega corporation? How do you retain the best people over the years? I heard that CEOs actually have no impact in large companies. How do you have a successful software company in this day with only three good machine learning engineers left? I'm just saying I've heard Wolfram Research really needs to hire more machine learning experts. How do you do that when good machine learning people don't work for less than 150k? How many people could someone lead? After starting a business, how do you know when you should secure an attorney? It's such a large expense, but it seems like an unavoidable necessity. Any plans to take a trip into space? How much more should the CEO make than the median salary? I am 17 right now. Do you think the USA is better than the UK for business and innovation? Second question: Do you think it's a good idea to start building companies in your 20s, or is it a better idea to first build (theoretical) experience and go for it later on? As in, what do you think of people in their early 20s building machine learning/AI startups? Do you have any heuristics for deciding when to stop or dramatically alter a long-term and expensive research project? It is tempting to be very quantitative about measuring the output of your various projects and teams in Wolfram and trying to optimize. Could this also leave people feeling like robots? Have you ever made any of your employees sign employee contracts with non-compete agreements? Are there any focused research teams at Wolfram, like full-time researchers on AI/machine learning? Are there any plans to open offices in Germany? You were very successful at a young age. How can one be confident toward older or more experienced people? What quality should we look for in people to determine if working with them will improve us? Do you have ideas for intermediate-scale projects/companies (maybe 25 or fewer people) that you aren't working on because they aren't compatible with Wolfram's size? What is your favorite chocolate? What was your reaction to getting the MacArthur grant? Was it exciting? What did you do with the money? (Was there money attached to it back then?) View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (92 videos)