Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (66 videos)

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

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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 20, 2023) »

1 hour 22 minutes

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How do you handle the pressure of deadlines? Is it better to turn in something rushed/unfinished or complete it fully with the risk of being late? We are creatures of motion, not stagnation? Not just physically, but also in relation to careers/life events? ​​Parkinson's Law is the adage that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. ​​Can you discuss working with many people vs. working as a "hermit"? Did you get lonely during the NKS days, during other periods of your life, etc.? I learned recently that Ramanujan in his local town in India was discouraged from going to Cambridge because crossing the ocean was interpreted as leaving one's identity behind. How to manage? I would love to hear your thoughts on making big changes in your life and how you approach them. Are there techniques that you've come to rely on to guide you in life? Is there value to stimulating and inspiring people other than oneself, in spite of the delays in your personal research endeavors? When is 14 coming out? Any upcoming holiday plans? How do holidays generally affect work life? How do you manage working for a global company? What advice do you have with scheduling around timezones and such? What would be Stephen's 2023 Year in Review? Not to forget observer theory! Encourage everyone to read the essay. ​​Will there be a German translation on the second thermodynamics law book? View Less »
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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 6, 2023) »

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How do you manage conducting deep/long-term innovation with short-term commercial and funding necessities to keep the lights on? How well would you say your current understanding of business and academics is today in comparison to when you first started your career? What is your perspective on AI's omnipresence and ability to introduce a universal basic income into the strata of societies/economies on Earth? What rules will be applicable? Do you think that with the disappearance of physical labor due to AI automation, it will make a comeback as a healthy hobby? ​​How do you anticipate AI-to-AI conversations? What sort of information and insights are likely to emerge from these conversations? ​​Do you ever take time off? Would you say that a person whose job is also their hobby is a happy person, or a person lacking in both the job and the hobby? ​Is game theory useful for running a business? Not necessarily business, but fun... ​Have you ever been to a magic show? How have interview processes changed since you began your career? Are there ways to improve application screening and potential candidates? Could VR/AR environments be a way to test candidates in the work environment? Should there be an AI system that does computational language design? The computational language could then be used to tackle problems of any kind and feed back to the language-design AI. Do ever worry you'll end up like Wittgenstein, solving philosophy and the boundaries of science with an innovative math-related system, then a couple years later decide you're wrong? View Less »
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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 15, 2023) »

1 hour 18 minutes

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How would you describe what you do? Can you contain it to a single sentence? What advice do you have for future programmers? Any advice for someone content to just "get by" financially, with zero interest in the usual understanding of "career" and probably no kids—just looking to focus on other things? Why don't you quit CEOing and commit full time to investigating whether nature is completely computable? Does running the everyday things help? Or do you just still find it fun? Do you think there will come a major shift in business planning with AI? ​How much control do you maintain over the Wolfram Institute? Do you find that loosening your grip on management of the fellows' research allows for a higher chance of success in discovery? There is this tension regarding remote working vs. being in the office. From my experience in remote-working teams, juniors/new starters take a few months before they are efficient. It appears you have mastered remote working with your teams. What do you think makes remote working a success? Whenever you were, or are, learning new stuff as part of your independent research efforts (whether that's directly related to your work at Wolfram Research or for your own purposes), do you have a structured purpose, i.e. "I will learn X subject, topic by topic," or do you take a looser approach to things? How do you know how much time to dedicate to your various research interests? How is innovating "outside the system" different from working within institutions? Is one better than the other for certain fields? View Less »
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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 1, 2023) »

1 hour 13 minutes

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Will startups survive using AI and ML technology? If so, how to compete with big industries? How often do you find yourself stuck on what to do next? How do you decide on what project to move forward with? How do you prepare for conference talks? Do you ever get nervous/stage fright? Someone asked E. W. Deming how he felt about his speech and he responded with, "I know what I said, but I am not sure what they heard." I bring my cats to talks so they can look cute if I bomb. Any thoughts to what a leader or manager can do to support team members to learn and manage stress? I understand this is a very context-dependent question, but lately a lot of large organisations earning profits in the billions have been scaling down their workforce. As a CEO, what would you say are common drivers/motivators behind these trends of scaling down? What would you say is your favorite aspect of being CEO? What is your least favorite? I would like your advice. I will retire in about 3-4 years; do you think it is too late to start learning ML, data science, the entire artificial intelligence environment, with all the mathematics that entails? I was thinking of dedicating part of my day to streaming as a hobby—something to keep my mind active. I am in the software QA and testing industry. One of my challenges is convincing decisions makers about investing in early testing approaches to reduce project and product risks later. As a CEO, how would you be convinced to add priority to testing in an organisation? Any advice on being prolific/focusing as a college student, specifically, the tradeoff between open-ended exploring and focusing? ​​I think a huge amount of the value of college is having informal discussions with small groups of people you care like. Obviously not compatible if you're focused on GPA. Hermits acquire cats, not children! View Less »
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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (October 4, 2023) »

1 hour 17 minutes

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What do you think is the most important aspect to focus on or dedicate the most effort to when running a business? You were a speaker at the All-In Summit 2023, which was a conference aimed mostly at venture capital folks. What were your impressions of this summit and its attendees? Did you attend parties at the All-In Summit? Do you get demotivated to do things that AI might be able to do in a fraction of the time in the relatively near future? What's your take on privacy, especially for digital services and devices (regarding companies using data to manipulate people and things similar to that)? Could you imagine the web being washed away as it did to other technologies? How has the concept of "intellectual property" evolved? Is land a good analogy for IP? Do you know about the recent anti-trust cases brought against Google and Amazon? If yes, what kind of opportunities do you think would open up for competitors if they lose? ​​Have you ever gone through the patent process personally? ​​Maybe ChatGPT can make patenting things easier. Maybe the ambiguity is a feature of natural language instead of a negative, and it's purposefully not specific to allow more expansive, unpredictable scopes of use. With LLM lawyers, the patent disputes will end up just being a bunch of robots arguing all the time. Is diversifying my professional ventures a worse outcome than focusing on one or two occupations that I'm really good at? There are somewhere between five hundred thousand and two million cuneiform tablets just sitting in warehouses. Untranslated, unscanned, inaccessible. What can we do other than lament? When you first started making sales with Mathematica, was it mostly to academics or companies? And how did you find these customers? Let's say an amateur claims to have found a big breakthrough. How do you judge if it is worth the read? View Less »
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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 6, 2023) »

1 hour 25 minutes

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Is writing the same as thinking? After reviewing your Wikipedia page, I noticed that you left undergraduate/postgraduate study before graduation for whatever reason. My question pertains to how you found the application process and background study for being accepted into a PhD program. If you could give some background into how much studying you had completed by that point and how you demonstrated your ability to be accepted, I would be very grateful. ​​Great piece about Doug Lenat and CYC. Any further thoughts about such intrinsically driven, lifelong research pursuits—including your own—be it their significance, their risks or anything in between? ​I'm finishing my PhD. There are so many industries/groups! Much more than I know, for sure... How can one find "the one" in the ocean? What made you and Jonathan decide to go on a livestream? Was it planned, or do you just randomly decide to do a livestream if the discussion is interesting enough? ​​How do you determine whether a decision should be decided short term or long term? How did you allocate your time across strategy, product development, operations, etc., during the early stages of Wolfram Research, and how has that evolved as the company has grown? If you could create and design a school, how would you structure the curriculum? Would it be different for elementary, middle and high school vs. college? Do you have a favorite of your livestream series? Are there other types you'd be interested in? ​​Would you suggest working for a startup that is building on an idea from a renowned research institution, or working directly at that institution? That's basically what they teach you when learning to ride a motorcycle. You trend toward where you're looking. Along these lines, is it better to say "This is going to be difficult" or "Don't worry, it's not complicated"? Do you have any advice for people who want to be independent researchers? View Less »
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