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

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 »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 7, 2022) »

1 hour 27 minutes

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Is it worth moving to the USA from the UK/Europe to pursue a career in science, mathematics or engineering? What if one wants to change the world? How long should one wait after college to start some startup in an area of their interest/expertise? When you are thinking deeply about a problem, do you think "on paper" or on a computer or a tablet or...? Do you find one of them to be better than the others? Can you tell a couple "stamp-licking" stories from the early days of starting Mathematica/Wolfram Research? What are your thoughts on crypto and blockchain from a business perspective in general? What do you think have been some of the most interesting and hard questions you've been asked here and elsewhere? Can ChatGPT increase productivity? Is outsourcing writing skills beneficial or damaging? "AI did my homework" is the inverse of "the dog ate my homework"—you don't want to be in either situation! Visual AI can produce amazing inspirations for jewelry and that sort of intricate art. Do you drink caffeine sources like tea or coffee? How many per day? What practices do you use to gauge and cultivate meaningful accountability as an individual and as part of a collective? What was your revenue plan and time-to-revenue when starting your company? We know that you use a hierarchical knowledge organization (files in folders), but did you ever try to use a networked knowledge organization (e.g. Logseq, Roam Research, Mem.ai, etc.)? Thoughts on the best way to organize knowledge? Wolfram documentation is amazing because it's connected (related functions). I think the knowledge graph thesis is to give people epistemological tools and make it visual. But epistemology isn't something people worry about all the time while writing daily notes. Have you "driven" a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode? It's out now for beta testing and it's magical. It's so, so good. Purely a vision + neural net implementation. Do you enjoy collecting and organizing physical books? Libraries are endless fun! View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 23, 2022) »

1 hour 23 minutes

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As a British native, do you participate in Thanksgiving festivities? Do you ever use spreadsheets or any other type of specialist app to manage information? Or is your main tool Mathematica? Do you go through periods of low motivation? If so, what do you do to get over that? Should I travel? Pi Day at SXSW was pretty special! I've been to one of your talks. The first time was around 1990 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Wolfram is the reason why I purchased a NeXTSTEP computer—because it included a copy of Mathematica. I think a lot of people are deep in mainstream university discourse and it is good to have talks to open up and stimulate curious people to break out of the stream if they want. Well, "they" say nothing beats person-to-person contact, as opposed to video conferencing. Then again, maybe "they" just like to travel to exotic places (disclaimer: I hate travel)! If you have to think about it (doing more in-person talks/traveling)... the answer is no. Unless you absolutely love it, there is no value in it. How about meeting people that don't go to universities but are really engaged in and doing hobby projects in computer and mathy stuff? Have you ever been to Idaho? Doesn't have to be a big and public place. Just talking back and forth, having a conversation. Big talks are not needed. What's the goal? To interact and make friends or lay the seeds of the Wolfram universe? Have you thought about making a video streaming and conferencing platform that integrates with your notebooks and computational language? Or do Google and Zoom do that well enough? You could periodically host "Wolfcon." Only folks interested would be likely to show up. As far as virtual interaction, I like Q&A streams, but also CA and physics streams. If I were you, I would make appearances conditional with a personal request based on your curiosity. Example: "I'll come to Paris, and in return I want you to pre-arrange a three-hour private tour with a senior curator at the Louvre for me and my wife." Wouldn't a conference on the Physics Project, in collaboration with a major university, help further disseminate it within the academic community? You should do a talk with Gerard 't Hooft. How come you were not on the Apple keynote when the Intel-based Macs were announced during the Mathematica demo? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (November 9, 2022) »

1 hour 21 minutes

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How do you prepare for your keynote talks about new technologies and Wolfram Language features? What barriers currently still exist that keep AR/VR from being widely useful in the workplace? One thing I genuinely appreciate about Stephen is his obvious incredible delight when explaining concepts, particularly related to science. Does he ever have to force it? Do you take part in clinical trials? Diagnosing is definitely a potential job for AI. Can Wolfram Language screen for diseases or illnesses? Is it possible to change human DNA by intention, I mean by eating foods or taking medicine? Do you try to convince your children to go to specific universities/schools, or do they decide by themselves without any impact from you? Multiple screens are nice, but I feel it's less productive sometimes. Sort of the same thing as multitasking being a myth. I feel like I am someone who has a lot of interests. I did my engineering degree a decade ago but I want to study mathematics, physics, philosophy and neuroscience too. Have you also been someone with diverse interests? If so, how do you manage them? I feel like I struggle with wanting to learn so much more—I feel like it's a lot better to be focused and simple-minded. Any tips for fixing a chaotic filesystem? My files are scattered everywhere. What do you do when you feel like you're stuck in the mud and can't get out? How do you write? How much do you use the mouse while writing in a notebook? Do you have any preferences in reading hard copy vs. digital? You should have an automatic email word cloud generator. Does UV hurt the paper? Physical books are heavy and bulky, while ebooks are never bigger than your favorite tablet! What is the oldest book you own? Do you think storage devices like tapes and punch cards might come back sometime? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (October 26, 2022) »

1 hour 17 minutes

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Do you have any fun Halloween plans? Any memorable costumes you've dressed up in or have seen? If you could spend the day as any animal in the world, what would it be? What might the change in perspective allow you to understand and apply toward your current work? What are your thoughts on providing feedback to employees? What methodologies and tools do you use? How can we best help an employee to grow before letting them go for underperformance? I just finished reading Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About by Donald Knuth. He briefly mentions the possibility of the universe being a cellular automaton. Have you ever read this book? Maybe "project" is not an adequate word for undertakings like Wolfram|Alpha. Do you have a timeframe for the Physics Project, or is it a lifelong project? If you had to work on another idea/project, what would that be? How would you tackle a problem? Dive into it or first observe the bigger picture? What's your way of studying something new? Understanding the historical evolution of concepts or reading from textbooks and working out examples? I have to wonder how Bertrand Russell would have viewed the Wolfram Metamathematics Project! What has been the typical response when reaching out to "academics" to join the Physics Project? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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