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

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (August 23, 2023) »

1 hour 35 minutes

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Just saw your new blog about Ed Fredkin—what an interesting read! What was writing the blog like? Do you enjoy these more biographical pieces vs. more purely technical pieces you've written? When you first created Wolfram Language and the other products around it (Mathematica), how did you develop a team of engineers/scientists to work on building your vision? Any advice for students returning to school in the coming weeks? Any advice regarding trying to promote technology "from the future"? I really would like to program, but I feel like I need to grasp every concept before moving forward. Should I give up? It seems like there's always something I don't know, and sometimes others can't explain it, either. Do you deal with this? Any tips? Do you think it's harder to kick-start a business today than it was 40 years ago? Agree: Finance, especially quantitative finance, is a black hole for talent/smart minds. Picking a major that determines your life/career at 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later, or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or two. Some industries just squeeze the juice out of bright young people until there's nothing left and you're replaced: finance, consulting, law, advertising, etc. How do you avoid this? Regarding: Picking a major that determines your life/career at 18 seems daunting. What advice do you have? I worry about picking something and regretting it later, or feeling like I've wasted my time if I decide to change my major after a year or two. What do you think is the best way to organize creative work? Personally, I don't think much of creative work is possible to formulate in a step-by-step plan off the bat. I envy cats with their 18–20 hours/day of sleep. If you are running a business, is it necessary to have the knowledge or ability to run any aspect of that business yourself, or can you rely on people to run those areas for you? If you read books, you get better at reading books. If you program, you get better at programming. If you program with a book next to you, you get better at finding relevant examples in that book. But you don't learn to program by reading a book. Do you think philosophy is still relevant in all these areas? How would you deal with falling down the recursive rabbit hole too much? Because this makes learning about a specific subject extremely slow. What do you make of company governance? Is there a "best way to set up a company board" etc.? I'm really curious on your thoughts about these UAPs as a leader in your field. What is your opinion on what's going on? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (August 9, 2023) »

1 hour 10 minutes

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What are the challenges of working in interdisciplinary fields? What do you make of one-person businesses? They seem to be trendy these days. How do I become "world class" in a subject? It might be mathematics or computer science etc. Who are some young people who inspire you? What are they working on? When did you realize that what you do now is what you wanted to do in your life? Have you always been an excellent public speaker? Thomas Watson used the THINK slogan to exhort employees to "take everything into consideration." Can you share some of the things you do as a manager/CEO to create a culture of people who actually think? In a previous episode, you said that you personally learned most efficiently by doing small self-initiated projects. How did you generate the project ideas? Could you give an example? Is there a systematic way to do this? Has livestreaming changed any aspects of development meetings? How has that changed your workday? Are there any classic novels or nonfiction books that helped form your curious and resilient mindset, i.e. books that soothed any anxiety about potential negative implications from scientific advancements? How do you stay brave? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (70 videos)