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

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (April 5, 2023) »

1 hour 30 minutes

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Should I become a programmer? At what age do you think kids should start learning computer-related skills? Should programming be a core class for students, like math and English? What do you think are good ways to introduce computational thinking to kids? But can you really get to a point to ask if there is something that you want to do that can be solved computationally without at least going about a trial-and-error-type process? "Human-AI coauthorship" is what I call it now. What would be some examples of the differences between programming, mathematical thinking and computational thinking? Or is there a difference? Is this just a colloquial thing? Would you consider hiring someone without a technical background? What is the minimum body of knowledge one should gather before being able to produce meaningful ideas in one research area? What was the hardest part in starting Wolfram Research? What are your thoughts on learning things outside of your domain of expertise? How should one balance their time between diving deep into their primary domain and exploring things outside of that? What valuable new products will Wolfram Research build using AI in the next decade? What ideas do you have that you hope others build? What do you think is going to happen in the next five years with AIs? What's the next big "surprise" thing like ChatGPT you think will come? What's the worst thing that could happen with AI? Are you concerned that we are building our murderer? Or that we have to simulate worlds empty of influence to determine the genuine intentions/alignments of an AI? Which is better: ChatGPT calling a plugin, or a plugin/standalone calling ChatGPT? Depends on the application, probably. I'd love for an AI to be able to, for instance, teach me chess in the most optimal way by figuring out my weaknesses and how to reinforce my learning. One thing to consider: If the galaxy is incredibly vast, why wouldn't an AI just leave Earth so that it can gather resources elsewhere? Or it could even explore the universe. Staying on Earth seems like it'd be very limiting to an AI or superintelligence. How can one NOT get left behind socially and economically in the wake of AI innovation? One thing I was thinking earlier is that what we're going to be seeing now is "automation of AI," where we have lots of websites and APIs that do one machine learning task well, and then we're handing off data from one model to the next. I like the idea of LLMs acting as the core interface module for a "soup" of APIs in a cognitive/hybrid AI architecture. View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (March 1, 2023) »

1 hour 27 minutes

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What is your favorite blog/book you've written? Any specific reason, why or why not? How was your trip? Was it for business or just for fun? As a remote CEO, do you ever get cabin fever from being home constantly? Do you try to keep work in certain rooms of your home to combat this? Have you tried anything like tracking your sentiment as you work by using a neural net to analyze a video feed of your face/body? I'm struggling with this nagging feeling that I'm progressing slower than I want to. I know I'm doing what I can, but I still can't shake it off. Have you ever dealt with this? If so, how? What management strategies do you use to get the most out of your employees? How can I increase the chance of my admission to a master's degree in complex systems or cognitive sciences? How do you decide on when to make a big change in the technology you use/build, for example, switching Wolfram Workbench from Eclipse to VS Code? Good project definition—formalizing what a project means—is one very important part. But how much do money/stock options/vacations (to avoid burnout) influence employee morale? Or giving them a project that they want to work on, or people they want to work with? I've been one to say, "If I get more money, I'll care more." In the end, it didn't work. It's better to optimize for things that you just like working on. What do you think about code review/peer review? Does it slow down a company or research? Do you think there are other alternatives to this? How often do you work on the Physics Project in terms of weeks or months? How do you manage your life to work on this when finding the rule of our universe has no business case (at least in the short term)? How do you deal with confusion and the feeling of "I don't understand this"? Given your knowledge of the foundations of math and physics: do you bother to research the fundamental theories of project management, or try an attempt to formalize it, experiment with different project definitions, etc.? How is the process of picking a mentee? Do you look for specific clues? Is there anything an individual can do to stand out? You seem to care a lot about the history of ideas in scientific areas. Do you think this is a must for producing meaningful work in research? I work as an innovation consultant. For a year now I have been on a journey to redesign/innovate and develop a new type of computer case. But I battle with this feeling all the time that I will fail and don't have a chance against all the "giants." How do I overcome this feeling? Or do I just accept it and go on? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 15, 2023) »

1 hour 22 minutes

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How did you begin your journey into the livestreaming world? It's not something I see most CEOs doing, and I must say it is enjoyable to see one such as yourself be available in such an open capacity to share your knowledge and engage with others. Do you ever get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, dealing with so many topics and the feeling that you will never get everything done? Have you ever made a bad decision on a project? Do you own up to it? What do you do about it? Estimating the time to build a feature is hard. Have you found any task-estimation practice that works well? Do you have unconditional confidence? What allows us as human beings to be successful in our endeavors despite disbelief, discouragement, etc., while attempting to solve our problems in the world implementing tech, science and other domains? Ideas can be great. Implementation will define how they go over. What strategies can be used to break down research projects into tasks that can be distributed to collaborators in order to leverage the fact of being a group? Do you think a career working on AI tools for use in science and mathematics is likely to have a big, positive impact? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 1, 2023) »

1 hour 25 minutes

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Congratulations on the recent blog post! Can you talk about the process of writing a blog post like this? Why did you decide to do a three-part series? Congratulations! Refreshing. Great timing, as thermodynamics is now used in generative AI models, i.e. nonequilibrium thermodynamics. What are your thoughts on salaries and compensation, especially for virtual/remote companies that employ people from different locations? I really like the way you define different writing styles for different projects. What led you to do that? How do you define the limits of an article or book and go through the writing process? I find that when I write something up and I have to back up all my assertions, I reveal what I should've been investigating in the first place. How should one go about learning how to split equity when founding a company? How do you know if you are giving too much or too little? You said you can understand French. Are there any other languages you're familiar with? Are there other languages you would like to learn or wish you would've learned? Do you recommend exposing children to a second language? Is it harder to learn another language as you get older? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (January 18, 2023) »

1 hour 39 minutes

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What is the one question (or all questions) a CEO must be asking himself every day? Why did you choose walking as your main exercise? Did you try other modalities? Is there a scientific reason or just personal preference? Did you do any analysis regarding which exercises deliver the best benefits for the time/energy spent? Have you thought about using ChatGPT to help you write a fiction book? I saw recently someone used AI to create a children's book in the time frame of a weekend. What do you do when you are feeling that you are lost or unmotivated and not having a clear vision into what should be done next in your business endeavors? Ruliaptor! I'm very impressed at how well you express yourself in these videos. Do you think writing has helped you in this regard? What are your thoughts for the coming wave of founders starting generative AI companies? I feel like Chat GPT and the art AIs will be able to make full-blown movies algorithmically. I've used ChatGPT for writing technical instructions and procedures at work. I really dislike doing them myself, and GPT gives an excellent first cut with English better than I could write it. I think you would have to include that you used chat as an aid for the email. How do I focus on a problem? There are so many aspects in literature and following cross-referencing can be overwhelming. How do you deal with distractions and not get overstimulated by external forces? How do you stay focused on hard tasks? Can I ask about "team building," particularly with highly technical types of peoples (scientists, engineers, savants)? What is your advice for someone employed full time in the industry doing something else to do research in another area? How did you find out that you would excel at physics and computational physics? Will you open source the Stephen Wolfram bot? Do you have an overview of all the projects you have in your company? What do you think about too many versus too little projects? Do you think it is a good idea to treat coding/programming as a sport, i.e. the same as football, e.g. score a goal, become famous? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 21, 2022) »

1 hour 29 minutes

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What are your thoughts on operational systems and how they impact personal productivity? Have you ever used Microsoft Windows? Could you tell us a bit of your computer setup (OS, productivity tools, files sync systems, etc.)? With consistent routines and self-tracking, have you developed a strong intuition for how many keystrokes you've made in a day or how many steps you've taken in a day? Other Wolfram-y intuitions? I'm working on an IRC-client for my old Tiki 100 computer. I will only use IRC on that computer. It has to send signals to the PC that reroutes it into IRC though. But it should work. The Tiki 100 is a Norwegian computer released in 1984. It has a Zilog Z80 processor and 64 KB RAM and some chunky video framebuffer. Would you be able to go back to pencil and paper? Like pure research? My first experience on a computer was the Commodore 64 playing Oregon Trail. Did you ever program any games? Do you have any career advice/job seeking advice? I graduated, and searching for a job is quite slow. I've also been considering starting some sort of (3D printing) business instead but don't really know how I can gain the skills for that. What made you start a business? How do you manage the "holiday madness" around this time of year (packed stores, more drivers than usual on the roads, house full of family)? How do you apply computer science, 500+ employees, new kind of business to architecture and city planning for billions? Do you ever feel like you spend too much time managing people instead of solving technical problems, or is the balance just right? Is it safe to say a business is a machine made of people? How do you decide balancing effort towards invention vs. innovation? Not just your own effort and time but also the Wolfram organization. Can this sort of scaling (employees needed for a functioning company) get modeled and planned by your technologies? I guess sub-projects are a good thing to have when doing projects that involve more than one person. As technologies become more and more complicated, do you sometimes feel a sense of losing control, or that it gets really overwhelming to try and understand how everything works? How do you encourage people to envision a positive future when things aren't currently going as they expect? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (76 videos)