Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram (born 1959) was a physics prodigy — Caltech PhD at 20, MacArthur fellow at 21 — who left academia to build computational tools: Mathematica (1988), the Wolfram Language, and the Wolfram|Alpha answer engine (2009). His 2002 tome “A New Kind of Science” argued that simple computational rules underlie nature’s complexity, a thesis he has pursued ever since through the Wolfram Physics Project.

Explaining — and equipping — ChatGPT

When ChatGPT erupted, Wolfram responded in character: with a 20,000-word essay. “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?” (February 2023) became the standard technical-but-readable explanation of large language models and a bestselling book. He treated the models’ success as a genuine scientific discovery — evidence that human language is computationally shallower than we thought.

He also acted on his own diagnosis that neural nets shouldn’t be trusted with computation. In March 2023, in collaboration with OpenAI, he launched the Wolfram plugin — “ChatGPT Gets Its Wolfram Superpowers!” — letting the chatbot call Wolfram|Alpha and Wolfram Language for exact math and curated data, followed weeks later by a kit for building such plugins. It was one of the earliest and clearest demonstrations of what became tool use, pairing statistical language with symbolic computation.