Making Wolfram Tech Available as a Foundation Tool for LLM Systems

There's a lot of value in the implementation of many strong and fast algeorithms in computer algebra in proprietary tools such as Maple, Wolfram, Matlab. However, I (though of course believe that such work needs to be compensated) find it against the spirit of science to keep them from the general public. I think it would be good service to use AI tools to bring open source alternatives like sympy and sage and macaulay to par. There's really A LOT of cool algorithms missing (most familiar to me are some in computational algebraic geometry)

Additionally I think because of how esoteric some algorithms are, they are not always implemented in the most efficient way for today's computers. It would be really nice to have better software written by strong software engineers who also understands the maths for mathematicians. I hope to see an application of AI here to bring more SoTA tools to mathematicians--I think it is much more value than formalization brings to be completely honest.

There's a great discussion with Stephen Wolfram on the Sean Carroll podcast. Listening to it made me think very highly of Wolfram. He's a free thinking, eccentric, mathematician, scientist; who got started doing serious work at a very young age. He still has a youthful creative approach to thought and science. I hope LLMs do pair well with his tools.

I tried using wolfram alpha as a tool for an llm research agent, and I couldn't find any tasks it could solve with it, that it couldn't solve with just Google and Python.

I like Mathematica and use it regularly. But I did not see any benefits of using it over python as a tool that Claude Code can use. Every script it produced in wolfram was slower with worse answers than python. Wolfram people are really trying but so far the results are not very good.

A simple skill markdown for Claude Code was enough to use the local Wolfram Kernel.

Even the documentation search is available:

```bash

/Applications/Wolfram.app/Contents/MacOS/WolframKernel -noprompt -run '

Needs["DocumentationSearch`"];

result = SearchDocumentation["query term"];

Print[Column[Take[result, UpTo[10]]]];

Exit[]'

```

Maybe I’m not understanding but what is different than just using existing wolfram tools via an API? What is infinite about CAG?

CAG sounds like fake solution for LLM's. Math problems are not custom data, they are limited in amount, and do not refresh like product manuals.

Hence math can always be part either generic llm or math fine tuned llm, without weird layer made for human ( entire wolfram) and dependencies.

Wolfram alpha was always an extra translation layer between machine and human. LLM's are a universal translation layer that can also solve problems, verify etc.

Sounds cool.

Aside, I hate the fact that I read posts like these and just subconsciously start counting the em-dashes and the "it's not just [thing], it's [other thing]" phrasing. It makes me think it's just more AI.

I read his book “A new kind of science” and quickly figured out why it was self-published. My goodness it’s bad and need of an editor.

A big disappointment as I’m a fan of his technical work.

>"But an approach that’s immediately and broadly applicable today—and for which we’re releasing several new products—is based on what we call

computation-augmented generation, or CAG.

The key idea of CAG is to inject in real time capabilities from our foundation tool into the stream of content that LLMs generate. In traditional retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, one is injecting content that has been retrieved from existing documents.

CAG is like an infinite extension of RAG

, in which an infinite amount of content can be generated on the fly—using computation—to feed to an LLM."

We welcome CAG -- to the list of LLM-related technologies!

Imagine Isaac Newton (and/or Gottfried Leibniz) saying, "Today we're announcing the availability of new mathematical tools -- contact our marketing specialists now!"

The linked article isn't about mathematics, technology or human knowledge. It's about marketing. It can only exist in a kind of late-stage capitalism where enshittification is either present or imminent.

And I have to say ... Stephen Wolfram's compulsion to name things after himself, then offer them for sale, reminds me of ... someone else. Someone even more shamelessly self-promoting.

Newton didn't call his baby "Newton-tech", he called it Fluxions. Leibniz called his creation Calculus. It didn't occur to either of them to name their work after themselves. That would have been embarrassing and unseemly. But ... those were different times.

Imagine Jonas Salk naming his creation Salk-tech, then offering it for sale, at a time when 50,000 people were stricken with Polio every year. What a missed opportunity! What a sucker! (Salk gave his vaccine away, refusing the very idea of a patent.)

Right now it's hard to tell, but there's more to life than grabbing a brass ring.