Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (78 videos)

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

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New episode streaming Wednesday, January 15, at 3:30pm ET. Submit your questions

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (May 3, 2023) »

1 hour 15 minutes

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Do you like philosophy? Do you see math as a part of it? Is it better to get a college degree in something practical like business and save interests as extracurricular classes or side hobbies? It just seems like being in a university allows you to spend more time learning, and also lends you access to the best tools and access to published information. But is there time to do things that you are personally interested in, like invention? Looking at all your blogs, which has been your favorite to write? Which has been the hardest? How successful do you think educational games would be for teaching children higher-level skills? Do you think they would absorb information faster compared to traditional education methods? Do you tend to focus on multiple tasks at once or focus on a single task until it's complete before moving on to the next one? I feel like I get overwhelmed by folders if I try to work on several projects at once, and would like advice on how to manage the overload. Are there conditions or situations that make you particularly creative? What do you pack when traveling? Is there a distinction like "continental vs. analytic philosophy" in computer science? How do you cultivate peace of mind? Do you have research assistants, or do you work on your projects on your own? How important do you think your culture of very direct communication has been to Wolfram's success? In retrospect, college is most important for opportunities to sit down with a few like-minded people and just openly talk. What are the most important insights and fundamental questions for planning and establishing a career? Do you find yourself still learning new things today? Is there a point in life where learning slows? What are some ways to combat that? How helpful is it to have routines? I find it a helpful method to make fewer decisions about my day and put my focus elsewhere. What is your breakfast? View Less »
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Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:
Business, Innovation and Managing Life (April 19, 2023) »

1 hour 33 minutes

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If you have a goal with many clearly defined milestones that are dependent on each other in order to get to the finish line, how do you generally approach that? Do you have a bucket list? What are some things you hope you see or experience in life that you haven't yet? What are common business skills that science people are commonly lacking? Did you ever imagine you would end up as a CEO, or did you plan to stay in the world of academia? Do you work more than you should? What's a good "work–time for yourself" ratio during a day for a person? Suppose that scientist X has published an important, empirically valid idea that all other scientists completely ignore. How should scientist X proceed? What was the last movie you watched? It's interesting to me to see how old movies imagined the "future" and seeing it compared to what today is actually like. What do you order from the concessions stand at the movies? What is more fun: being a professor at a university or teaching people live about things that interest you? What are the foundations that made you a decent scientist? What are your thoughts on the future of education? View Less »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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