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

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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (July 26, 2023) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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Did you see the Oppenheimer movie? If so, what were your thoughts? What are the things one should do to prepare oneself to become a scientist regarding education path, ideas and tools in the upcoming age of computation and AI? Can the "Kelly criterion," AKA calculating the sizes of bets to place in markets, also be a good tool to manage life? Which is to say, you limit the size of your experiments by design? Are you using any LLM functions for managing your daily workflow? If so, which ones? What's the "next big thing" in business? How will virtual spaces (like Apple's new headset) gaining popularity impact the workplace, if at all? I'm a software engineer with about eight years of professional experience. I'm interested in transitioning into the field of AI/machine learning. I've found it quite difficult to find careers in the marketplace that don't require 5+ years of experience in AI/machine learning. Any advice on how best to make this transition? What would you say to people who are scared to lose their jobs to AI? There are a lot of young professionals in the tech sector that are just getting started in becoming data analysts, project managers and engineers. We are starting to hear a lot of bustle about these careers not being good investments in the long term. A bit of a funny lifestyle question. What's your opinion on living off grid (living in a rural, quiet area) in modern times? Given the computational limitations of the human brain, are there drawbacks in thinking computationally? Do we risk losing track of high-level patterns with too many parts to count? When you were starting SMP, if someone else had already made significant progress in building a full-scale computational language, what would you have done? Any cool projects you enjoyed working with during the Wolfram Summer School? Science somewhat requires integration of many disciplines, but in academia, almost the only way to progress in your career is to publish stuff in your "area of expertise." View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (June 14, 2023) »

1 hour 29 minutes

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How do you balance work and life? Do you have advice for maintaining a healthy lifestyle while working? How do you find time for socializing and exercising? When will you retire and devote all of your time to your Physics Project, or is retiring out of the question? Have you ever thought about constructing a business model based on the principle of your physics model? Random task-delegation question: have you ever changed a flat tire? Have you ever researched the health benefits of certain foods? Does this influence your diet? Do you now write with the help of LLM? What does a typical summer look like for Stephen Wolfram? Has being a remote CEO become easier over the years? Do you ever miss being physically in the office? How helpful was it to have already built SMP before starting Mathematica? In terms of building software, what was the biggest challenge you ever faced and how did you solve it? Was it building Mathematica or was it earlier on? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (May 31, 2023) »

1 hour 5 minutes

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Do you think LLMs will give everyone something akin to a personal McKinsey consultant? How much efficiency is lost by needing to explain things to a team vs. doing a whole design alone? With schools ending for the year, what are some ways to continue teaching kids over the summer? Did your summer schedule ever change when your kids would get out of school for summer? What do you think about machine learning libraries vs. books? Do you think there is a current infrastructure out there for people to make libraries and sell them to users? It's interesting to think about people buying machine learning libraries for their AIs instead of books for their engineers. What are some simple mathematical tricks and shortcuts it would be good for kids to learn? This might make a useful blog post. Things like "For powers of 10, the little number is how many zeroes come after the 1" and "It's easy to get 10%, you just have to double it to get 20% or find half to get 5%". If you created an AI emulator of yourself, what would the first three rules of its conduct be? If you could "prompt engineer" an assistant bot for yourself, what would be the first three/most important "rules" you'd tell it to follow? I'm a software engineer with about eight years of professional experience. I'm interested in transitioning into the field of AI/machine learning. I found it quite difficult to find careers in the marketplace that don't require 5+ years of experience in AI/machine learning. Any advice on how best to make this transition? Will prompt engineering become a legitimate field of study at some point, or is this mainly a trend due to the current systems? What does it take up front for you to fully invest in a potential idea? Must there be a full proof of concept done prior, with rigorous testing? Isn't it inherently unwise to seek out AI help, especially in a corporate setting, as it may lead to leakage of information? Do you find that the key to being a productive person involves structuring your mind in such a way that you tackle problems in projects? What advice would you have for the sporadic-minded individual? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (May 17, 2023) »

1 hour 17 minutes

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From a leadership standpoint, what are your best teachings on how to lead with purpose? What is your leadership style? How do you handle making mistakes? It is impressive to see you (in a livecoding session) pull open a 20-year-old Mathematica document to refer to an earlier idea that you had. How have you managed your massive inventory of Mathematica idea notebooks over 30+ years? (e.g. do you create standalone Mathematica notebooks or massive ones?)? Have you seen other people learn to not need to "relax" and to continuously work, as you do? I am most satisfied when I'm being productive, but I find myself getting fatigued or losing focus at some point. How do you maintain your work ethic? Could you share your personal experience with how your intelligence has evolved as you've aged, particularly in terms of recall? Specifically, can you describe what it feels like for you when you take a brief pause of 0.2–2 seconds to grasp a concept while discussing complex topics in communication or video presentations? Do you have any advice for the new generation of college graduates entering the workforce? What's the best way to apply for jobs? How do you maintain those jobs for years to come? Do you think we'll get to a point where AI is in charge of interviewing? How could this be beneficial? Or even harmful? What is your advice on how to lead when you sincerely do know less about the subject than the people you're assigned to lead? As a company that functions worldwide, do you find language barriers to be an issue? Can AI help eliminate these barriers with some sort of universal translator? Are there any self-evaluation techniques that you would recommend for everyone? I'm curious about your approach to digesting new content, especially in the context of a research paper. In circumstances where time is limited and reading everything is not feasible, how do you determine when it's worth pausing to explore a referenced citation in depth versus continuing the reading without fully understanding the citation? Could you share your strategies for efficient and selective reading? How do I go about learning mathematical thinking? My school focuses on learning formulas and just solving questions in the age of computers. What would you suggest for a self-taught programmer on the "trader" side who wants to get more knowledgeable on "computational thinking"—books, courses, topics, anything you could share as clues for making a personal curriculum would be great! View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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