Business, Innovation and Managing Life (April 24, 2024)

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: How do businesses adapt to changing technology? Are there existing strategies to combat roadblocks in development? - Is Wolfram Language much faster today than it was 35 years ago? - What has been the biggest or most notable technological advancement in your lifetime? - ​​How do you think about the "buy" vs. "build" dilemma–notably for one so opinionated and driven to have it one's way as yourself, as opposed to being more compromising? - How do you think about and handle competition, be it business or technological competition (say LLMs vs. the Wolfram Language symbolic approach)? - Do you think having middle management in high-tech companies hinders innovation? - ​​You just mentioned that someone can't build something that took 30 years to build. Do you think that will change with AI advancing enough to cut build timeframes by orders of magnitude? - ​​Speaking of that area, what innovation and business lessons can be learned from Thinking Machines and such failed ventures? - Do you agree that technology is brimming with ideas and resources, many of which are free? This shift has transformed business approaches, with today's opportunities primarily centered around services. - I appreciate your approach to making software easy to use. I've used Oracle, SAP and JD Edwards ERP software and so much of it is overly complicated. We were tethered to them for support. - Any advice on starting a career in tech with everything moving at such a fast pace? - I've read about your endeavors, from writing books at 13 to earning a PhD at 20. How did you manage such accomplishments and cultivate the imagination needed for complex topics?