Stephen Wolfram

But it's not fundamentally different.

And by the way, as soon as we have this other level of description,

It's kind of, it helps us to go even further.

So we'll end up being able to produce more and more complicated kinds of things that just like when we, you know, if we didn't have a computer and we knew certain rules, we could write them down, we'd go a certain distance.

But once we have a computer, we can go vastly further.

And this is the same kind of thing.

Well, let's talk about sort of the low level of what ChatGPT is doing.

I mean, ultimately, you give it a prompt.

It's trying to work out, you know, what should the next word be?

Mm-hmm.

Right?

You know, the thing that has been sort of a story of my life is realizing that

simple rules can do much more complicated things than you imagine.

That something that starts simple and starts simple to describe can grow a thing that is, you know, vastly more complicated than you can imagine.

And honestly, it's taken me, I don't know, I've sort of been thinking about this now 40 years or so,

And it always surprises me.

I mean, even, for example, in our physics project, sort of thinking about the whole universe growing from these simple rules, I still resist because I keep on thinking, how can something really complicated arise from something that simple?

It just seems wrong.

But yet, you know, the majority of my life I've kind of known from things I've studied that this is the way things work.

So yes, it is wild that it's possible to write a word at a time and produce a coherent essay, for example.