Stephen Wolfram

then we can compute things from this.

And that's kind of the idea.

Okay, so that's an interesting thing, which we still don't know everything about, okay?

I mean, this question of going from natural language to computational language.

In Wolfram Alpha, we've now, you know, Wolfram Alpha's been out and about for, what, 13 and a half years now.

And, you know, we've achieved...

I don't know what it is, 98%, 99% success on queries that get put into it.

Now, obviously, there's a sort of feedback loop because the things that work are things people go on putting into it.

But we've got to a very high success rate of the little fragments of natural language that people put in, questions, math calculations, chemistry calculations, whatever it is.

We do very well at that, turning those things into computational language.

Now, from the very beginning of Wolfram Alpha, I thought about, for example, writing code with natural language.

In fact, I was just looking at this recently.

I had a post that I wrote in 2010, 2011 called something like programming with natural language is actually going to work.

And so we had done a bunch of experiments using methods that were a little bit, some of them a little bit machine learning-like, but certainly not the same kind of idea of vast training data and so on that is the story of large language models.

Actually, I know that post, a piece of utter trivia, but that post...

Steve Jobs forwarded that post around to all kinds of people at Apple because he never really liked programming languages.

He was very happy to see the idea that you could get rid of this layer of engineering-like structure.

He would have liked, I think, what's happening now because it really is the case that you can... This idea that you have to kind of learn how the computer works to use a programming language is something that is, I think, a thing that... Just like you had to learn the details of the opcodes to know how assembly language worked and so on.

It's kind of a thing that's a limited time horizon.

But kind of the... So this idea...