If you scroll down a bit, I think the 26th paragraph comes closest to lucidity:
- "What will the Wolfram Institute be like? There’ll be a leadership core, which, yes, I’m signing up to head. But the main meat of the institute will be a collection of researchers and fellows, working on particular, managed projects—together with students at multiple levels from high school to graduate school. We’ll be doing open science, so there’ll be lots of livestreaming and lots of open tools produced. There’ll be lots of working materials and academic papers published, and whenever we manage to make a big step forward our plan is to present it to the world using the immediate and accessible approach to exposition that I’ve developed."
This sounds like it was written by a business school undergrad student who regrets not choosing a STEM major and is a subscriber to Lex Fridman, 2 minute paper, veritesium....and now they want to "disrupt" the world with AI research.
The tossout of “open science” and “open tools” without any explanation is a red flag. Translation: “we’re looking for people who might be convinced to work for free if we promise to give some shit away”. Open science is tantamount to Facebook w/data theft for anyone involved at a sub-professional level of name recognition.
I think you're assuming too much. They don't go deep into it because they're used to it - they do tons of live coding/science livestreams, for example. And they pay money and the wage is not bad.
His writing style reminds me of those sites that want to sell you information but won't tell you unless you "buy it today for the low price of $19.99(or whatever price)." :)
That sounds amazing! I wish they'd study something like energy storage or cheap imaging mmWave radar, or portable chemical analyzers, or any of those supposedly world changing things that seem to totally vanish without a trace again whenever anyone makes a breakthrough.
I think he was pretty clear that the Wolfram Institute, headed by Stephen Wolfram, has the single purpose of exploring the Wolfram Multicomputation model as a new foundation for all of science and mathematics. To do so, it is going to apply Wolfram's methods for productivity that have made Wolfram Research a successful company, and Wolfram Physics Project a successful delivery. Also of note, any major discoveries will be shared to the world in Wolframs clear and simple exposition style.
In short, maybe this leads somewhere, who knows, but right now it looks like a massive vanity project. It also looks like it has a good chance to start derailing other people's money from actual research into Wolfram Pet Theories.
You can't deny it he has been very productive over the years. If he can pass on what has made him so productive, on to the next research generation, that's a definite plus for his institute.
It is very much sarcasm on my part, but I was explicitly paraphrasing what is definitely an honest belief from the article:
"[...] whenever we manage to make a big step forward our plan is to present it to the world using the immediate and accessible approach to exposition that I’ve developed."
Even people who don't care much for cellular automata must respect Mathematica. So seeing that they plan to develop a lot of "open tools" is interesting. Even if nothing comes of the research itself, the tools they develop could be valuable.
