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Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems
- petcat 8mo agoSounds cool. Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.
- mr_mitm 8mo agoIf there is one person who likes to hear himself talk too much to use AI, it's got to be Stephen Wolfram.
- jacquesm 8mo agoIt's like Stephen Wolfram, only now there is 10x more of it...
- llbbdd 8mo agoThe other day I formatted a sentence out loud in the "it's not just x it's y" structure and immediately felt gross, despite having done it probably a million times in my lifetime. That was an out-of-body feeling.
- zamadatix 8mo agoWhen I notice that I change it to "it's y, not just x" just to catch others off guard :).
- MillionOClock 8mo agoOh no! Now it's going to be in the training dataset :'(
- nerevarthelame 8mo agoIn George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," [0] one of his primary recommendations for writing well is to "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." "It's not just X, it's Y" definitely seems to qualify today. It's a stale way to express an idea. I hadn't revisited that essay since LLMs became a thing, but boy was it prescient: > By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms [and LLMs], you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself ... But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. [0]: https://bioinfo.uib.es/~joemiro/RecEscr/PoliticsandEngLang.pdf https://bioinfo.uib.es/~joemiro/RecEscr/PoliticsandEngLang.p...
- llbbdd 8mo agoThank you for sending this, I've read it through twice and it's already affected how I approached some writing I did today. Even just forcing myself to think "what is another way to say this?" feels like it activates a different part of my brain that goes "well, what were you really trying to say in the first place?", and it's humbling when my mind comes up blank to that. It reminded me of this comment I saw earlier[0] referring to a situation where Werner Herzog essentially cache-busted a Reverend, who was brought to tears when he could no longer reply with the templates that kept him stoic before. Maybe we stand to lose more than our voices to the machine if we're not thoughtful. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119373
- gnatman 8mo agoIf you go back to a random much older post you’ll find emdashes aplenty. e.g. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2014/07/launching-mathematica-10-with-700-new-functions-and-a-crazy-amount-of-rd/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2014/07/launching-mathem...
- _alaya 8mo agoPlot twist - AI reasoned that Stephen Wolfram actually was the smartest human and thus chose to emulate his writing style.
- scoot 8mo agoLLMs use the em-dash excessively but correctly. This post is littered with them in places they don't belong which makes it look decidedly human, as if written by someone who believes that random em-dashes make their writing look more professional, while actually having the opposite effect.
- arjie 8mo agoIt's Stephen Wolfram, mathematician and computer scientist. This is how he portrays himself https://content.wolfram.com/sites/43/2019/02/07-popcorn-rig1.png https://content.wolfram.com/sites/43/2019/02/07-popcorn-rig1... Somehow I don't think "trying to make my writing look professional" is very high on the priority list.
- metabagel 8mo ago> This post is littered with them in places they don't belong Does he speak the same way - pausing for emphasis?
- keybored 8mo agoIf you really want to know: more than one emmy-dash per paragraph is probably excessive. > LLMs don’t—and can’t—do everything. What they do is very impressive—and useful. It’s broad. And in many ways it’s human-like. But it’s not precise. And in the end it’s not about deep computation. This is a mess. What is the flow here? Two abrupt interrupts (and useful) followed by stubby sentences. Yucky.
- written-beyond 8mo agoIdk about the grammatical correctness of the punctuation, but I really enjoyed reading his writing. Never read something by him before, it was genuinely refreshing, specially given it was a glorified ad.
- metabagel 8mo agoIt's a conversational writing style.
- irishcoffee 8mo agoI just read it in Morgan Freemans voice and it sounded pretty great.
- sdeiley 8mo agoThere are dozens of us that used them before AI! Dozens!
- nubg 8mo ago[flagged]
- porcoda 8mo agoThe em-dash metric is silly. Some people (including me) have always used them and plan to continue to do so. I just pulled up some random articles by Wolfram from the before-LLM days and guess what: em-dashes everywhere. One sample from 2018 had 89 of them. Wolfram has always written in the same style (which, admittedly, can be a bit self-aggrandizing and verbose). It’s kinda weird to see people just blowing it off as AI slop just because of a —.
- skolos 8mo agoI like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.
- ai-christianson 8mo agoWhat do you think the problem is?
- owyn 8mo agoI think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing. But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.
- mr_mitm 8mo agoBack when I was using it, mathematica was unmatched in its ability to find integrals. Has python caught up there?
- currymj 8mo agosympy is good enough for typical uses. the user interface is worse but that doesn't matter to Claude. I imagine if you have some really weird symbolic or numeric integrals, Mathematica may have some highly sophisticated algorithms where it would have an edge. however, even this advantage is eaten away somewhat because the models themselves are decent at solving hard integrals.
- tptacek 8mo agoI've always sort of assumed the models were just making sympy scripts behind the scenes.
- nphardon 8mo agoThere's a great discussion with Stephen Wolfram on the Sean Carroll podcast. Listening to it made me think very highly of Wolfram. He's a free thinking, eccentric, mathematician, scientist; who got started doing serious work at a very young age. He still has a youthful creative approach to thought and science. I hope LLMs do pair well with his tools.
- jadbox 8mo agoI'm fairly certain Stephen Wolfram will be one of the few intellectuals today that will still be remembered in 50 years.
- SpaceNoodled 8mo agoI already remember him from 25 years ago
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- squeefers 8mo agohe seems to be a good software engineer at least, but what about his science? does it all revolve around re-modelling the universe in his software?
- peter_d_sherman 8mo ago>"But an approach that’s immediately and broadly applicable today—and for which we’re releasing several new products—is based on what we call computation-augmented generation, or CAG. The key idea of CAG is to inject in real time capabilities from our foundation tool into the stream of content that LLMs generate. In traditional retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, one is injecting content that has been retrieved from existing documents. CAG is like an infinite extension of RAG , in which an infinite amount of content can be generated on the fly—using computation—to feed to an LLM." We welcome CAG -- to the list of LLM-related technologies!
- ddp26 8mo agoI tried using wolfram alpha as a tool for an llm research agent, and I couldn't find any tasks it could solve with it, that it couldn't solve with just Google and Python.
- nradov 8mo agoWell sure, in theory any mathematical problem can be solved with any Turing complete programming language. I think the idea here is that for certain problem domains Mathematica might be more efficient or easier for humans to understand than Python.
- snowhale 8mo ago[dead]
- Recursing 8mo agosympy and similar packages can handle the vast majority of simple cases
- snowhale 8mo ago[dead]
- hiuioejfjkf 8mo ago[dead]
- cornholio 8mo agoThe obvious use case here is deep mathematical research, where the LLM can focus its reasoning on higher level concepts. For example, if it can reduce parts of the problem to some choices of polinomials, its useful to just "know" instantly which choice has real solutions, instead of polluting its context window with python syntax, Google results etc.
- maxdo 8mo agoCAG sounds like fake solution for LLM's. Math problems are not custom data, they are limited in amount, and do not refresh like product manuals. Hence math can always be part either generic llm or math fine tuned llm, without weird layer made for human ( entire wolfram) and dependencies. Wolfram alpha was always an extra translation layer between machine and human. LLM's are a universal translation layer that can also solve problems, verify etc.
- troymc 8mo agoYou wouldn't use an LLM to solve a big Linear Programming problem, because it would cost way more than using the Simplex Method, and you'd be worried that it might be wrong.
- qrios 8mo agoA simple skill markdown for Claude Code was enough to use the local Wolfram Kernel. Even the documentation search is available: ```bash /Applications/Wolfram.app/Contents/MacOS/WolframKernel -noprompt -run ' Needs["DocumentationSearch`"]; result = SearchDocumentation["query term"]; Print[Column[Take[result, UpTo[10]]]]; Exit[]' ```
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Davidzheng 8mo agoThere's a lot of value in the implementation of many strong and fast algeorithms in computer algebra in proprietary tools such as Maple, Wolfram, Matlab. However, I (though of course believe that such work needs to be compensated) find it against the spirit of science to keep them from the general public. I think it would be good service to use AI tools to bring open source alternatives like sympy and sage and macaulay to par. There's really A LOT of cool algorithms missing (most familiar to me are some in computational algebraic geometry) Additionally I think because of how esoteric some algorithms are, they are not always implemented in the most efficient way for today's computers. It would be really nice to have better software written by strong software engineers who also understands the maths for mathematicians. I hope to see an application of AI here to bring more SoTA tools to mathematicians--I think it is much more value than formalization brings to be completely honest.
- fragmede 8mo ago> against the spirit of science Unfortunately, the bank doesn't accept spirit of science dollars, and neither does the restaurant down the street from me either.
- falcor84 8mo agoWhat does this have to do with anything? We as a culture decided that science is worthwhile, and that it's worth funding it with public money, which I personally strongly support. With that in mind, I want us to continue contributing to making scientific research and the benefits that it provides to be disseminated freely, while also paying good scientists with actual dollars that they could spend in restaurants.
- DiggyJohnson 8mo agoIndividuals and small groups make decisions in their own interest. The same is not true of society. That’s the issue that the GP is asking you to respond to
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- ripped_britches 8mo agoMaybe I’m not understanding but what is different than just using existing wolfram tools via an API? What is infinite about CAG?
- Eggpants 8mo agoI read his book “A new kind of science” and quickly figured out why it was self-published. My goodness it’s bad and need of an editor. A big disappointment as I’m a fan of his technical work.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lutusp 8mo agoImagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!" The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent. And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting. Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times. Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.) Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.
- Joel_Mckay 8mo agoI like a lot of Stephen Wolfram's work, but we must also recognize the questionable assumptions he made in many of his commercial projects. There is a difference between cashing-in and selling-out... but often fame destroys peoples scientific working window by shifting focus to conventional mundane problems better left to an MBA. I live in a country where guaranteed health care is part of the constitution. It was a controversial idea at one time, but proved lucrative in reducing costs. Isaac Newton purchased the only known portrait of the man who accused him of plagiarism, and essentially erased the guy from history books. Newton also traded barbs with Robert Hooke of all people when he found time away from his alleged womanizing. Notably, this still happens in academia daily, as unproductive powerful people have lots of time to formalize and leverage grad student work with credible publishing platforms. The hapless and unscrupulous have always existed, where the successful simply leverage both of their predictable behavior. =3 "The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod) https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axelrod.pdf https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...
- vixen99 8mo ago
- pcj-github 8mo agoThe blog post would have been more effective with a specific example of what it solves, a demo, or at least some anecdotes of what this has already solved via these integrations. As it stands, it comes off rather self-aggrandizing and a bit desperate, as though Wolfram tech perceives itself as threatened to remain relevant.
- umairnadeem123 8mo ago[dead]
- yosito 8mo agoYou're right. And it's also important to be mindful that the LLMs can also translate between human intent and formal queries incorrectly, so they still shouldn't be fully trusted even when integrated with a more deterministic system.
- danpalmer 8mo agoLLMs using code to answer questions is nothing new, it's why the "how many Rs in strawberry" question doesn't trip them up anymore, because they can write a few lines of Python to answer it, run that, and return the answer. Mathematica / Wolfram Language as the basis for this isn't bad (it's arguably late), because it's a highly integrated system with, in theory, a lot of consistency. It should work well. That said, has it been designed for sandboxing? A core requirement of this "CAG" is sandboxing requirements. Python isn't great for that, but it's possible due to the significant effort put in by many over years. Does Wolfram Language have that same level? As it's proprietary, it's at a disadvantage, as any sandboxing technology would have to be developed by Wolfram Research, not the community.
- adius 8mo agoI also think that sandboxing is crucial. That’s why I’m working on a Wolfram Language interpreter that can be run fully sandboxed via WebAssembly: https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi
- danpalmer 8mo agoAwesome. I'm pretty unfamiliar with the Wolfram Language, but my understanding that the power of it came from the fact it was very batteries-included in terms of standard library and even data connections (like historical weather or stock market data). What exactly does Woxi implement? Is it an open source implementation of the core language? Do you have to bring your own standard library or can you use the proprietary one? How do data connections fit into the sandboxing? I realise I may be uninformed enough here that some of these might not make sense though, interested to learn.
- adius 8mo agoYes, we agree that a lot of the value comes from the huge standard library. That's why we try to implement as much of it as possible. Right now we support more than 900 functions. All the Data functions will be a little more complicated of course, but they could e.g make a request to online data archives (ourworldindata.org, wikidata.org, …). So I think it's definitely doable. We also want to provide an option for users to add their own functions to the standard library. So if they e.g. need `FinancialData[]` they could implement it themselves and provide it as a standard library function.
- adius 8mo agoI agree, but to be truly foundational, it needs to be open source and accessible for everyone! That’s why I’m working on an open source implementation of Mathematica (i.e. an Wolfram Language interpreter): https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi https://github.com/ad-si/Woxi
- wyan 8mo agoIsn't there already Maxima which is several decades old?
- mkl 8mo agoMaxima, Axiom, SymPy, and many more CAS systems exist. They don't run Mathematica code, so if that's your goal they don't help.
- yorwba 8mo agoIsn't most of the value of Mathematica in the standard library instead of the language?
- adius 8mo agoYes, definitely! So we also try to implement as much of it as possible. Currently we support over 900 functions of the 6000 from Mathematica!
- quantumdot42 8mo agoCall me when you have the upgoat/downgoat functions implemented :-)
- yorwba 8mo agoReferring to https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/71631/upgoat-or-downgoat https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/71631/upgoat-or... I assume.
- 8mo ago
- centricle 8mo agoI can't help but think about Wolfram every time I go into my thinking-about-ai mode. Really not sure how to frame all this stuff, but jeez there's a nexus, right?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- vjk800 8mo agoEvery major technological invention nowadays quickly breeds open source clones that evolve to be on par with the commercial ones on some time scale. Why hasn't this happened to Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica? I know there's Sympy, but it's so far behind Mathematica that it's not even comparable. Is the heavily mathematical nature of the tool somehow an insurmountable obstacle to the open source community?
- anonzzzies 8mo agoSageMath? I never used it but I hear it passing by as alternative. (And this one popped in Google as second when I just searched; https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core https://github.com/Mathics3/mathics-core)
- leethargo 8mo agoSageMath is much broader than SymPy, by integrating a lot of third-party niche tools that have been developed for decades, often as C libraries. Unfortunately, SageMath is not directly usable as a Python package. That's where passagemath [0] comes in, making the rich ecosystem of SageMath available to Python devs, one package at a time. [0] https://github.com/passagemath/passagemath https://github.com/passagemath/passagemath
- vjk800 8mo agoSympy is part of SageMath. SageMath is just a kind of user interface to Sympy and a bunch of other Python libraries. Mathics I haven't tried.
- Micoloth 8mo agoIt’s a great question. As soneone who has been fascinated by Wolfram Aplha for a loong time (and might or might not have thought about cloning it), i think that growing up i ended up realizing that Mathematica in the real world just doesn’t… Do much? Maybe i’m just missing something. But it looks like nobody is really using it except for some very specific math research which has grown from within that ecosystem from the beginning. I think one of the basic problems is that the core language is just not very performant on modern cpus, so not the best tool for real-world applications. Again- maybe i’m missing something?
- jwr 8mo agoLots of big words there, but can I now expose the local Mathematica (confusingly renamed Wolfram a while ago) that I'm paying for, through MCP to Claude Code? Because it seems I can't and all the big words are about buying something new.
- vitorsr 8mo agoUnsure if this is what the announcement is referring to: https://resources.wolframcloud.com/PacletRepository/resources/Wolfram/MCPServer/ https://resources.wolframcloud.com/PacletRepository/resource...
- simianwords 8mo agoIs mathematica code in the pre or post training set?
- seanhunter 8mo agoYes. You can get llms to generate just about anything you want in mathematica and in particular the gpt-4.4 -> 4.5 generation had a massive improvement in mathematica code correctness in particular so it really seemed to me at that stage they specifically worked on it.
- larodi 8mo agoOne thing me.Stephen never made available is for people to copy results of Wolfram Alpha… he persisted doing so even after ocr and LLms were omnipresent, so somehow I don’t trust him even though his reload theory seems very appealing and apparently the team there understands production grammars very well since 1996.
- verytrivial 8mo agoSomething this "shape" has been coalescencing since the first tool calls were done. To draw another Star Trek parallel, this reformulation is what Brent Spiner is during the little stares and pauses made before answering a complicated but constrained problems on the show. Onward!
- piker 8mo agoLines up with the current YC advice to "make something agents want". Not sure it makes a lot of sense to try and build a VC-backed business like this, but if distribution is the moat these days, perhaps.
- scotty79 8mo agoHe's 10 years too late for that. That's how you lose by keeping your stuff proprietary. The world innovates without paying any attention to you and you get left behind. Imagine if 10 years ago Wolfram software was opensourced. LLMs would be talking it since the day one.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo ago>Imagine if 10 years ago Wolfram software was opensourced. They would have lost ten years of profits and development would have slowed.
- wyan 8mo agoOr accelerated, since development would have ceased to be restricted to Wolfram's employees
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoIf that was really going to be the case then we wouldn't be having this discussion, there would already be an open source streaking ahead.
- scotty79 8mo agoHave you seen a little piece of software called Python that basically single-handedly ushered the age of AI? What did Wolfram do except playing toys in his high walled sandbox? Figuratively half of the comments under this post are "I guess it's cute but I can't see anything in there that I couldn't do with Python".
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoYet people are still paying for Mathematica and you are calling for it to be open sourced. If the open source was so great what Wolfram did would be irrelevant.
- AJRF 8mo agoEvery time I go to purchase a hobby license for Wolfram / Mathematica I give up because their product offering is the most convoluted i've seen in my life. Why can't I just pay some price and get the entire bundle of Wolfram One Cloud + API calls + LLM Assistant + This new MCP access + Mathematica? I need to buy 5 different things - and how does that look for me the user, I need 5 different binaries? They really should sort that out, I know they are losing money because of this. I emailed their support once and ended up getting more confused.
- ozim 8mo agoMaking a bad joke based mostly on my impression how Wolfram feels superior, but.. If you’re not smart enough to figure out how to buy it you probably won’t have much use of it anyway.
- woadwarrior01 8mo agoMy first thought on CAG was that it sounds a bit like bolting on an MCP server onto SymPy (AFAIK, the closest OSS thing to Mathematica). And it turns out someone has already done that. https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/computer_algebra_mcp/ https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/computer_algebra_mcp/
- pbronez 8mo agoI wonder how this will compare, long term, to giving LLMs python sandboxes. Why implement an MCP server for a single library when you can give the LLM an interpreter running a distribution with arbitrarily many libraries? Probably the trick is teaching the LLM how to use everything in that distribution. It’s not clear to me how much metadata that SymPy MCP server bakes in to hint the LLM about when it might want symbolic mathematics, but it’s definitely gonna be more than “sympy is available to import” Also, reading through TFA, Wolfram is offering more than a programming language. It includes a lot of structured general purpose information. I suspect that increases response quality relative to web search, at least for a narrow set of topics, but I’m not sure how much.
- teleforce 8mo agoPlease check this book for machine learning and AI with reproducible codes in Wolfram language by Etienne Bernard [1]. [1] Introduction to Machine Learning: https://www.wolfram.com/language/introduction-machine-learning/ https://www.wolfram.com/language/introduction-machine-learni...
- stared 8mo agoEither I miss something, or is it yet another marketing approach by Stephen Wolfram? The post talks about "foundation tool", yet it offers an MCP to a proprietary app (out of miriads of such). Sure, as any other tech, Mathematica may have its edges (I used it deeply 10-15 years ago, before I migrated to Python/Jupyter Notebook ecosystem). But in the grand scheme of things, it is yet another tech, and one that is losing rather than gaining traction. Certainly not "a new kind of science".
- seabass-labrax 8mo agoStephen Wolfram doesn't claim that Mathematica is a "new kind of science"; that's the slogan he uses instead to refer to the theoretical physics model (one based on state transitions) that underpins his 'Wolfram Physics Project'.
- stared 8mo agoThis I know - it was a tongue on check to the claim on „foundational models”.
- whywhywhywhy 8mo agoUltimately by making their language and tooling closed and paywalled they doomed it to never be relevant to an LLM ever.
- guerrilla 8mo agoFucking finally. What took them so long. This needed to be done day one.
- gavinray 8mo agoRecent shower thought: "Wolfram has a huge array of unique visualization tools for math. Wouldn't it be neat if LLM's could embed them in responses, for people wanting to teach themselves math that are visual learners?"
- bwoah 8mo agoRelevant discussion of Kagi and Wolfram (2024): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39606048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39606048
- johntheagent 8mo ago[flagged]
- slater 8mo agoBots aren't allowed on HN, please stop spamming.
- wyan 8mo agoHaving been both in academia and industry, to me Stephen always sounds too academic for business, but for academia, a mix of too "industry" and a crank.
- browningstreet 8mo agoIf he'd failed at his endeavors and didn't have a very successful company, that might be interesting insight. Since that didn't happen, it feels like you're fronting with your judgement in spite of its irrelevance to his arc.
- qubex 8mo agoI know this marks me out as a very specific and fairly derided kind of nerd, but I’m really excited to see what new features will be included in Mathematica 15 which is presumed to be launching fairly soon.
- morgango 8mo agoFor the low, low price of $5/month.