I’m a little distracted, and this Wolfram news is considerably bigger than I was thinking.
If it’s the plugin news, it’s three weeks old. On March 23 OpenAI opened ChatGPT to plugins, in alpha, with a first group of partners that included Expedia, Instacart, Klarna, Shopify, Zapier — and Wolfram. Stephen Wolfram’s own account is the one worth reading. ChatGPT, he writes, “can’t itself be expected to do actual nontrivial computations, or to systematically produce correct (rather than just ‘looks roughly right’) data.” With the plugin it “can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as ‘computational superpowers’.”
That’s the part that’s bigger than it looked. A language model that talks well and computes badly is a novelty. Put a calculator, a curated data library and live feeds behind it and it starts to resemble a professional.
I think it now allows the creation of an AI astrology service — a birth chart is, after all, arithmetic on the positions of the planets, and arithmetic is what Wolfram is for — and, more seriously, a finance engine for anyone who isn’t an MBA but sits in a C-suite position and needs one. The sums a finance director carries in their head can now sit behind a chat window that never mis-adds a column. There is money there. I’ve sent over a plan on the finance side.
Also, a heads up: someone has started running AutoGPT on five requests I gave, and the play-by-play is awesome. So cool. For anyone who missed it, AutoGPT came out on March 30, and unlike a chatbot waiting for its next command it “works autonomously by breaking the main goal into smaller sub-tasks and using tools like web browsing and file management to complete them.” It was the top trending repository on GitHub soon after. Reading its log is the nearest thing yet to looking over a new hire’s shoulder while they work out what to do.
This is brilliant for legal too. You could load in contracts and communications and ask it to research potential avenues to explore for litigation.
