The Leading Edge of 2023 Technology … and Beyond

Today we’re launching Version 13.3 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica—both available immediately on desktop and cloud. It’s only been 196 days since we released Version 13.2, but there’s a lot that’s new, not least a whole subsystem around LLMs.

Last Friday (June 23) we celebrated 35 years since Version 1.0 of Mathematica (and what’s now Wolfram Language). And to me it’s incredible how far we’ve come in these 35 years—yet how consistent we’ve been in our mission and goals, and how well we’ve been able to just keep building on the foundations we created all those years ago. Continue reading

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

A New Kind of Notebook

We originally invented the concept of “Notebooks” back in 1987, for Version 1.0 of Mathematica. And over the past 36 years, Notebooks have proved to be an incredibly convenient medium in which to do—and publish—work (and indeed, I, for example, have created hundreds of thousands of them). And, yes, eventually the basic concepts of Notebooks were widely copied—though still not even with everything we had back in 1987!

Well, now there’s a new challenge and opportunity for Notebooks: integrating LLM functionality into them. It’s an interesting design problem, and I’m pretty pleased with what we’ve come up with. And today we’re introducing Chat Notebooks as a new kind of Notebook that supports LLM-based chat functionality. Continue reading

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

Building Blocks of “LLM Programming”

Prompts are how one channels an LLM to do something. LLMs in a sense always have lots of “latent capability” (e.g. from their training on billions of webpages). But prompts—in a way that’s still scientifically mysterious—are what let one “engineer” what part of that capability to bring out. Continue reading