News, Views & Insights
We originally invented the concept of “Notebooks” back in 1987, for Version 1.0 of Mathematica. And over the past 36 years, Notebooks have proved to be an incredibly convenient medium in which to do—and publish—work (and indeed, I, for example, have created hundreds of thousands of them). And, yes, eventually the basic concepts of Notebooks […]
Prompts are how one channels an LLM to do something. LLMs in a sense always have lots of “latent capability” (e.g. from their training on billions of webpages). But prompts—in a way that’s still scientifically mysterious—are what let one “engineer” what part of that capability to bring out.
So far, we mostly think of LLMs as things we interact directly with, say through chat interfaces. But what if we could take LLM functionality and “package it up” so that we can routinely use it as a component inside anything we’re doing? Well, that’s what our new LLMFunction is about.
A few weeks ago, in collaboration with OpenAI, we released the Wolfram plugin for ChatGPT, which lets ChatGPT use Wolfram Language and Wolfram|Alpha as tools, automatically called from within ChatGPT. One can think of this as adding broad “computational superpowers” to ChatGPT, giving access to all the general computational capabilities and computational knowledge in Wolfram […]
Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think […]
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well […]
Over the last few days, I’ve been asked how ChatGPT (particularly allied to Wolfram|Alpha) will affect education, how it relates to “computational literacy for all” and the computer-based mathematics education that my book The Math(s) Fix provides a blueprint for.
Wolfram is involved in Edtech in many other ways too; it will be great seeing how the full range of powerful integrations emerge that can deliver better education.
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.
I’ve been tracking neural net technology for a long time (about 43 years, actually). And even having watched developments in the past few years I find the performance of ChatGPT thoroughly remarkable. Finally, and suddenly, here’s a system that can successfully generate text about almost anything—that’s very comparable to what humans might write. It’s impressive, and useful. And, as I’ll discuss elsewhere, I think its success is probably telling us some very fundamental things about the nature of human thinking.