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

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

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

1 hour 17 minutes

✕ close

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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (May 3, 2023) »

1 hour 15 minutes

✕ close

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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (April 19, 2023) »

1 hour 33 minutes

✕ close

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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

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

1 hour 30 minutes

✕ close

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

✕ close

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

✕ close

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 »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (85 videos)