Stephen Wolfram on AI, human-like minds & formal knowledge

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In this fascinating exposition, Stephen Wolfram connects two of the most important breakthroughs of our time: AI and the ruliad.

I ask Stephen how he thinks about knowledge hypergraphs, which I’m exploring at Open Web Mind https://www.openwebmind.com/

He offers several important insights.

Stephen draws a distinction between human-like minds and formal knowledge.

Human-like minds include both our own brains and Large Language Models. Such minds, Stephen suggests, are good at making broad but shallow connections.

Formal knowledge, on the other hand, is deep and precise. Stephen has spent a lifetime building computational towers of such knowledge.

He proposes that Large Language Models might serve as interfaces to formal knowledge. He warns, however, that much of this knowledge might be inaccessible to minds like ours.

To illustrate the difficulty, Stephen contrasts the 50,000 or so concepts to which we humans have assigned words, such as “cat” and “dog”, with the infinite variability an AI can generate, both within human concepts and in the interconcept space in between.

Tying this back to physics, Stephen Wolfram posits that the concepts of space, time, energy, etc. we have internalized occupy only a tiny part of the ruliad.

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Stephen Wolfram
• Stephen Wolfram https://www.stephenwolfram.com/
• The Wolfram Physics Project https://www.wolframphysics.org/
• Wolfram Institute https://wolframinstitute.org/
• Wolfram Institute Community Discord   / discord  

Related writings from Stephen
• Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2...
• How to Think Computationally about AI, the Universe and Everything https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2...
• The Concept of the Ruliad https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2...
• Stephen’s 104-step proof https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2... of the minimal axiom for Boolean algebra is reproduced in its fully incomprehensible form on pages 810 https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p8... and 811 https://www.wolframscience.com/nks/p8... of his book A New Kind of Science https://lasttheory.com/book/a-new-kin...

More on knowledge hypergraphs at Open Web Mind:
• Open Web Mind https://www.openwebmind.com/
• Open Web Mind YouTube channel    / @openwebmind  
• Sign up for my newsletter https://www.openwebmind.com/newsletter/

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The Last Theory https://lasttheory.com/ is hosted by Mark Jeffery https://markjeffery.com/ founder of Open Web Mind https://www.openwebmind.com/

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