This is part of an ongoing series about our LLM-related technology:ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!Instant Plugins for ChatGPT: Introducing the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin KitThe New World of LLM Functions: Integrating LLM Technology into the Wolfram LanguagePrompts for Work & Play: Launching the Wolfram Prompt RepositoryIntroducing Chat Notebooks: Integrating LLMs into the Notebook Paradigm

In Just Two and a Half Months…

Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as “computational superpowers”. It’s still very early days for all of this, but it’s already very impressive—and one can begin to see how amazingly powerful (and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call “ChatGPT + Wolfram” can be.

Back in January, I made the point that, as an LLM neural net, ChatGPT—for all its remarkable prowess in textually generating material “like” what it’s read from the web, etc.—can’t itself be expected to do actual nontrivial computations, or to systematically produce correct (rather than just “looks roughly right”) data, etc. But when it’s connected to the Wolfram plugin it can do these things. So here’s my (very simple) first example from January, but now done by ChatGPT with “Wolfram superpowers” installed: Continue reading

The Shock of ChatGPT

Just a few months ago writing an original essay seemed like something only a human could do. But then ChatGPT burst onto the scene. And suddenly we realized that an AI could write a passable human-like essay. So now it’s natural to wonder: How far will this go? What will AIs be able to do? And how will we humans fit in?

My goal here is to explore some of the science, technology—and philosophy—of what we can expect from AIs. I should say at the outset that this is a subject fraught with both intellectual and practical difficulty. And all I’ll be able to do here is give a snapshot of my current thinking—which will inevitably be incomplete—not least because, as I’ll discuss, trying to predict how history in an area like this will unfold is something that runs straight into an issue of basic science: the phenomenon of computational irreducibility. Continue reading