![]() ![]() It’s fun when I run into high-school and college kids who notice my name and ask “Are you related to Wolfram|Alpha?” “Well”, I say, “actually, I am”. And countless students have used it to solve problems, and learn.Īnd in addition to the main, public Wolfram|Alpha, there are now all sorts of custom “enterprise” Wolfram|Alphas operating inside large organizations, answering questions using not only public data and knowledge, but also the internal data and knowledge of those organizations. People around the world have used it to satisfy their curiosity about all sorts of peculiar things. Professionals have used it to do their jobs every day. Leaders and policymakers have used it to make decisions. ![]() Inventors have used it to figure out what might be possible. It’s been used by an immense range of people, for all sorts of purposes. It’s become part of chatbots, tutoring systems, smart TVs, NASA websites, smart OCR apps, talking (toy) dinosaurs, smart contract oracles, and more. And indeed, quite soon, it became clear that the vast majority of questions people were asking were ones that simply didn’t have answers already written down anywhere on the web they were questions whose answers had to be computed, using all those methods and models and algorithms-and all that curated data-that we’d so carefully put into Wolfram|Alpha.Īs the years have gone by, Wolfram|Alpha has found its way into intelligent assistants like Siri, and now also Alexa. But Wolfram|Alpha isn’t searching anything it’s computing custom answers to each particular question it’s asked, using its own built-in computational knowledge-that we’ve spent decades amassing. Perhaps because the web interface to Wolfram|Alpha was just a simple input field, some people assumed it was like a search engine, finding content on the web. And it became clear that the paradigm we’d invented of generating synthesized reports from natural language input by using built-in computational knowledge was very powerful, and was just what people needed. And within hours we knew it: Wolfram|Alpha really worked! People asked all kinds of questions, and got successful answers. But eventually there was no sense in going further until we could see how people would actually use it.Īnd so it was that on May 18, 2009, we officially opened Wolfram|Alpha up to the world. But by late 2008 we’d managed to get Wolfram|Alpha to the point where it was beginning to work. And it took lots of ideas, lots of engineering, lots of diverse scholarship, and lots of input from experts in a zillion fields. And I didn’t know for sure if we were in the right decade-or even the right century-to be able to build what I wanted.īut I decided to try. But while science fiction (think the Star Trek computer) had imagined it, and AI research had set it as a key goal, 50 years of actual work on question-answering had failed to deliver. Leibniz had talked about something like this 350 years ago Turing 70 years ago. To make it so that any question that can in principle be answered from knowledge accumulated by our civilization can actually be answered, immediately and automatically. To take all areas of systematic knowledge and make them computable. But it was only after some discoveries I made in basic science in the 1990s that I felt emboldened to actually try building what’s now Wolfram|Alpha. Over the years, I built some powerful tools-most importantly the core of what’s now Wolfram Language. I first imagined creating something like it more than 47 years ago, when I was about 12 years old. And we’ve been able to keep it private and independent, and its main website has stayed free and without external advertising.įor me personally, the vision that became Wolfram|Alpha has a very long history. Oh, and by now, a significant fraction of a billion people have used it. It’s found its way into more and more of the fabric of the computational world, both realizing some of the long-term aspirations of artificial intelligence, and defining new directions for what one can expect to be possible. It was a unique and surprising achievement when it first arrived, and over its first decade it’s become ever stronger and more unique. ![]() At some level, Wolfram|Alpha is a never-ending project. Today it’s 10 years since we launched Wolfram|Alpha. ![]()
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