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

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

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

1 hour 24 minutes

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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

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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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 18, 2024) »

1 hour 2 minutes

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For the new Notebook Assistant, what is the process for making a new product like that? When making a new product, is it harder to create something brand new with no competition or easier when there are competing products to compare? Good product; tbh I signed up and took it for a test drive yesterday. Great to chat and work Mathematica for a newbie like me; excellent progress in a short time. I bought a Wolfram subscription for my daughter who is in Year 7. However, it seems it is not very straightforward in usability for a 12-year-old who can use in her study intuitively. Would you consider enhancing or introducing new tools for a younger audience like my daughter? At least provide feature of ask random question in plain English and get concise answer with graphics to study science (chemistry, physics, biology). Do you ever watch funny cat videos? What do you think about Nvidia's CEO Jensen's approach to sending all through emails and having like 60 people directly report to him all day with email reports, and he is managing the whole company? I would love to see software development discussions from the ground up. Sort of a Live Software Engineering series to complement the content of Live CEOing. E.g. building the WordCloud function. I like seeing the design reviews during Live CEOing, but I'm always wondering how the functions actually get implemented in code and how software developers approach programming Wolfram Language functions. Do you have a cat? How many meetings would you say you attend a day? How do you get the most out of them? Apparently there is a small island inhabited by a throng of cats. They survive because the local fish jump out of the water onto the beach. I saw a TikTok saying if you eat eggs raised on farms with cats on there, you can kick the allergy!! Based on a random week earlier last month, you average about 12 meetings a week when they're "normal sized." What are your tips for consistently practicing self-discipline? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 27, 2024) »

1 hour 9 minutes

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If your last name was something like Smith, would you still have named your company after your name or gone with something different? How does one decide that? Are there certain criteria to fit so there aren't a bunch of "Smith" companies? Actually, now that I think about it, it's strange we don't have a dozen "Einstein" incorporations. Reminds me of the old Dilbert series where the pointy-haired boss says "The name of the project is the most important thing!" before they even know what the product will be. So a name is like a joke: if you have to explain it, then it does not work? Little like "complex numbers." Just the name sounds scary to students. Can names be copyrighted? What role does AI play in brainstorming or generating company names? Will AIs start naming and running their own company? With a name like Wolfram, people will think physics. Wolfram is becoming synonymous with cutting-edge physics. Are there any specific naming conventions or patterns that tend to perform well in the tech industry? Have you tried asking an LLM for business advice? Do you think trends in naming, like all the "-ify" startups, will hurt a brand in the long run? What advice would you give to a computer scientist that wants to pursue synthetic biology? That's important to have a way to gauge biological evolution as a state of increasing complexity. How do you determine how innovative something is? What are the key criteria for assessing innovation? What's the best way to test a business idea before going all in? I have experienced trouble at university learning electrical engineering. I can now understand the intent to teach the intuition in EE is not translated to coherent actions by the teachers. What are the pitfalls experts should avoid in order to maximize the quality of their teaching? I've always wanted to sequence my genome! Its amazing we have made this possible! View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 13, 2024) »

1 hour 14 minutes

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How long should someone expect to wait before a new business becomes profitable? In your personal/professional journey, what are the important things that you learned the hard way? Can you elaborate on some of the unique talents within your team? Perhaps extremely smart or methodical/disciplined people? Can you tell us about any exciting projects you're working on right now? What do you think about self-driving? Do you think Tesla's approach without LIDAR has legs or do you think the Google Waymo hardware-intense approach is more promising? Any tips for building a strong customer base from scratch? What's the best way to figure out pricing for a new product or service? With your work on Wolfram|Alpha and other projects, you've brought complex computational abilities to the general public in accessible ways. What were some of the challenges in making such powerful tools user friendly, and how do you think accessibility to high-level technology will shape industries in the future? If the CEO himself heavily uses the product, you know it's something special. Stephen, how do you personally define innovation? What makes something truly innovative instead of just a small improvement? How important are critiques? Which do you find more valuable: positive or negative feedback? I like real feedback. Pick it apart—that helps in fixing problems/strengthen whatever it is. I've been rewatching the first hour of your interview with Yudkowsky since yesterday... do you enjoy those types of interactions often? How do you balance maintaining the integrity of your original idea while incorporating customer feedback, which is often influenced by their familiarity with previous, incomparable solutions? Do you have a favorite interview/podcast/speech that you've done? Or one that you were most proud of? Are you aware that with the weekly livestreams, you basically invented THE PERFECT brain workout? Is there a topic or question you wish more podcast hosts would ask you about that they often overlook? What is something surprising people may not know about your "day job"? You have frequently written about your vast digital archive. What tool do you use for indexing and searching? What other tools have you used or considered in the past and what is your opinion about them? With the improving LLMs and RAG, how do you think searching and indexing will change? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (October 23, 2024) »

1 hour 12 minutes

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What are your top picks for "startup ideas for Mathematica users"? What's the future looking like for entrepreneurial business ventures and technology ones in particular, given what's happening with tools, capital, etc.? More solopreneurs? More big VC? Neither? In business, do you think it is better to try and start a business with a totally new idea that hasn't been done before or to reinvent an old idea your way? How do you advise young people with a similar all-consuming, intrinsic compulsion as yours, be it in their quest for knowledge/understanding or otherwise, and going about their careers/lives? If you're debating the efficiency of algorithm design with your team, how do you navigate conflicting feedback? Do you have an innately good memory or do you use memory tricks? Did you ever play an instrument? How do you develop speed reading and improve memory for a student or anyone who wishes to be better off intellectually? What financial advice would you offer to someone developing a new business idea with limited capital? When you run a business that provides a web service to international users, are you bound to comply with the laws of all countries from where the service is accessed? Learning to ask better questions seems to be arguably more relevant than ever before. How do you learn to ask better questions? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (87 videos)