Stephen Wolfram

It does tend to rely on the fact that, you know, if we look at the, you know, some ancient language that where we don't have a chain of translations from it until what we have today, we may not understand that ancient language.

And we may not understand its concepts may be different from the ones that we have today.

We still have to have something of a chain, but it is something where we can realistically expect to communicate abstract ideas.

And that's one of the big roles of language.

I think in...

This ability to sort of concretify abstract things is what language has provided.

Well, that's been a long debate in philosophy.

Right, which are beyond human.

I mean, much of what computers do, humans do not do.

I mean, you might say... Humans are a subset, presumably.

Yes.

Hopefully.

Yes.

Yes, right.

You know, you might say, who needs computation when we have large language models?

Large language models can just, you know, eventually you'll have a big enough neural net, it can do anything.

But they're really doing the kinds of things that humans quickly do.

And there are plenty of sort of formal things that humans never quickly do.

For example, I don't know, you know, some people can do mental arithmetic.

They can do a certain amount of math in their minds.