two

actually the number two IRL

Thanks for playing, everyone. I'll see you around.


bcj
@bcj

feel free to react to this as if it was whatever that post was going to be. Maybe later I'll remember and you can see if you were right


bcj
@bcj

I feel like the thing that comes the closest to what people promise or imply about LLMs is Wolfram Alpha. Not the it can write like a person thing, but as in, here’s a thing that has access to a huge collection of carefully catalogued information and has enough NLP to be able to apply this knowledge in basic but useful ways. It helpfully tells you how it interpreted your question so you can have reasonable confidence that its answers are correct (and the things it tends to be good at are things you could independently verify).

I don’t use it that often but, hey, it actually does what it promises if I quickly need to do some date math or compare population sizes or do some particularly weird unit conversions. I’m sure making it also involved paying people to little money to tag and format information, but for whatever hyperbole it launched with it’s actually a useful tool.

I feel like it’s an interesting comparison to LLMs because it’s use case (or use cases? I guess the real reason it exists is to convince people to pay for Mathematica) overlaps a bunch but it actually succeeds at the base idea of not lying to you. Also because for whatever hype it had at launch, it has settled into being a niche tool that probably is barely mentioned outside ‘people who have math homework’

I did no research for this post. If Wolfram has gone big into LLMs or blockchain or some other bullshit, sorry


two
@two

I regret to inform you that Wolfram has gotten really big into LLMs and blockchain. Interestingly Wolfram Alpha is now advertising their ChatGPT integration, which seems to me like a convenient way to cheat on homework twice at the same time.


This is a huge tangent, but - the whole thing is super bizarre because on the surface Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are fairly useful tools for a variety of things, but then I made the mistake of looking deeper into it and the Wolfram rabbit hole seems truly never ending. It feels like Wolfram is really into blockchain and AI because they're really into everything you could possibly do with computers. The amount of stuff you can apparently do with the whole Wolfram extended universe of software tools is genuinely frightening, and then I read Stephen Wolfram's massive blog posts that seem to occasionally imply the entire universe could run or could be running on Wolfram Language code??

I lost several hours of my life on this and was for a time somewhat distressed by Stephen Wolfram's pseudo-"the universe is a simulation" philosophy because I couldn't work out what was wrong with it. The answer is that if I read a well-produced 80,000 word blog post about anything I find it believable, that doesn't mean it's actually true. I have a text file saved from after that whole adventure, a note to self, which pretty much sums up to "do not research Wolfram Research".

Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are fine though, I guess. Just don't try to do any more research. Seriously.

(One kind of funny thing I did find is that there have been multiple incidents on Wikipedia of sockpuppet accounts spamming references to specifically Stephen Wolfram's work and adding promotional content to pages about it. Either Wolfram is paying for Wikipedia vanity or somebody else is going to significant effort to promote him for... some reason? It's odd.)


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