Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Does Stephen play any musical instrumentals? Would you consider songs formal systems? I've been imagining a multi-way graph for all of the chords on a guitar. - How do you think the behavior of innovation changes with scale? That is, what's the difference in innovation between startups, small businesses, and enterprises? - Do you have electronic-off day/time-window (no electronic communication and no computers etc)? - How do you deal with back pain or eye strain from reading too much? - If you started your business again, what would you avoid or do differently? - As we are eliminating jobs at light speed, how do you think society will cope with mass unemployment after we can automate majority of trade related jobs? - How did you manage the sales side when you started that first company? - If you were to go back in time, would you be able to get the world to 2020 tech within 20 years? - But what happens in the future when we have AIs that can simulate realities that are indistinguishable from reality? What if you can simulate people doing jobs? - Does Stephen Wolfram think that people should specialize in education earlier, instead of taking general classes in high school, focus on one field, get to undergrad level of education earlier? - Didn't Feynman study Mayan Hieroglyphs? - Can an old dog learn new tricks? (i.e. can a middle aged person learn math, programing, and be successful anywhere near someone that started when they were young.) - What innovations, if any, do you think may be most useful for K-12 public education in the US?

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (March 2, 2022)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the future of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa

Questions include: Can you comment on the future of LLMs being running in the cloud vs. being run on one's local machine? - Does the NANOGrav discovery spark ideas for experimental validation of the Physics Project? - Can you discuss the next evolution for AI models? So far we have: language models, image – text (classifiers), text – image (generators), etc. - What can be said for training multimodal AI models? - Do you think that we have reached a point of singularity such that any child born from today onward will never be able to surpass AI at any intellectual task, i.e. are we the last "useful" generation? - Is VR the future of UIs? - Given the two contrasting scenarios of a "Pink Plasma Heaven," where artificial general intelligence optimally solves problems for all sentient life, and a "Matrix Hell," where AI exploits humans as energy sources, how can we establish a guiding framework to navigate between these extremes? - To what degree do you think LLMs provide us with insights on the internal workings of our brain? Do you think there will be more lessons to learn from the structure of the human brain when designing the next generation of LLMs? - Does the spread of LLMs incentivize scientists (and humans in general) to become more deeply specialized (to "out-compete" LLMs in a narrow domain) or to become more broadly spread (in order to creatively generate connections between apparently remote domains)? - Will it be possible to use LLMs to achieve world peace? Or if world peace isn't big enough, can we beam LLM chats into outer space to try and get universal peace? - What do you think of power laws? What do you think are some good entry points for explaining the principles behind power laws? - What do you think of the future of AI in video games? They can be used to control the actions and dialog of NPCs, the design of the game's world and even the design of assets on the fly using little data. Video game assets can take up a lot of data, and if we could use AI to generate assets on the fly using a smaller amount of data, we could cut down on the download size of games as well as the effort needed to make assets. - How will we be able, in the future, to tell what we're seeing on screen isn't AI generated? Anything we could do today? (I think you might be a bot.) - Thinking in terms of inter-concept space, do you think there is an approach to using technology to develop a way in which we may better understand or gain experience to bridge the gap of inter-concept space between what we know and what we don't know? - When will this statement, "I think you might be a bot", be a compliment, rather than a criticism or an insult?

Future of Science and Technology Q&A: Live from the Wolfram Summer School (July 7, 2023)

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of nearly four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

On his podcast, Stephen discusses topics ranging from the history of science to the future of civilization and ethics of AI.

Business, Innovation, and Managing Life (March 2, 2022)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

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