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0 pointseternalban3y ago0 comments

> what he’s proposing

Sure, but as usual (just like the cellular automata business) Wolfram gives/has the impression that he is discussing something novel. And it ain’t novel, to say nothing of the fact that it is also a fairly obvious thing to do. Symbolic AI folks are not taking this LM business well. They are all coping.

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superposeur3y ago

These decades, whenever the word "Wolfram" comes up, reliably discussion will center on his tone and style. My advice: don't confuse the message with the messenger.

Mathematica (yes even I can't bring myself to call it "Wolfram Language" or whatever) is an exquisite and indispensable software system, a true aid to thought. Likewise for Wolfram Alpha.

(And yes, agree his cellular automata stuff is unconvincing.)

hgsgm3y ago

How is the guy who says "combine symbolic with probabilistic" the one who is "coping" with his system not being powerful enough, but the team who deployed a bot that is almost always wrong, is not "coping"?

eternalbanOP3y ago

You're right. How could I know this? I have formed an opinion about a person I have never personally met. Mea culpa. My impression then is that Stephan Wolfram, in spite of his considerable and quite & justifiably impressive brain, refuses to apply the necessary corrective measures to adjust for the fact of the existence of external agencies in the world when formulating his personal theory of the world.

> a bot that is almost always wrong

"It’s always amazing when things suddenly “just work”. It happened to us with Wolfram|Alpha back in 2009. It happened with our Physics Project in 2020. And it’s happening now with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. "

It is possible I missed the widespread excitement about Wolfram|Alpha and Project Physics. The former did make waves in geek circles, I remember that. The latter did not make it to the New York Times, did it?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Wolfram%7Calpha+stephan+wolf...

https://www.google.com/search?q=Project%20Physics%20stephan%...

https://www.google.com/search?q=ChatGPT

Coping with that, in his specific case.

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