Someone sent me Stephen Wolfram’s post on the new Wolfram plugin for ChatGPT. Upping our math IQ.
The idea is simple. ChatGPT, in Wolfram’s words, “can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as ‘computational superpowers’.” The language model handles the conversation and hands the actual computation to a system that has spent decades getting the arithmetic right. Wolfram is candid about why that’s needed: on its own, he writes, ChatGPT can’t be expected to do nontrivial computation or to produce data that is systematically correct rather than merely plausible.
He’d been arguing for exactly this since January, in an essay that caught ChatGPT confidently getting the distance from Chicago to Tokyo wrong, then proposed that ChatGPT could “talk to” Wolfram|Alpha the way a person does, with Wolfram|Alpha turning the natural language into precise computational language. About ten weeks later it shipped.
The plugin lets ChatGPT hand calculations to Wolfram|Alpha.
Not yet for me, though. I do know you need to apply specifically for plug-in access. It’s distinct from the other requests — OpenAI is running plugins as an alpha with its own waitlist, prioritizing a small number of developers and ChatGPT Plus subscribers before wider access — so I only found it last week.
