[HN Gopher] Chat Notebooks
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Chat Notebooks
Author : yurivish
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-06-09 20:00 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| DigiDigiorno wrote:
| While I think his notebooks and features look pretty useful, he
| frames the article around having invented "notebooks" 36 years
| ago before anyone else, and talks about other notebooks not
| having features that they've had since 1987. This is a pretty odd
| context to basically describe a new chat feature.
|
| Is this a record that should be set straight?
|
| I've used Jupyter since it was IPython notebook, but I don't
| think that community claims to be the first coming of notebooks.
| The accessibility of python along with the breadth and depth of
| the scipy community makes it a quite a tour de force. So perhaps
| these articles are aimed at people who only use open source
| tools.
| paulgb wrote:
| > I've used Jupyter since it was IPython notebook, but I don't
| think that community claims to be the first coming of
| notebooks.
|
| My recollection (which could be wrong, it's been a while) is
| that SageMath's notebook preceeded iPython notebooks. IIRC
| iPython started as a CLI repl, which may have come before the
| notebook.
|
| (Mathematica came before all of them, and likely inspired
| SageMath's interface)
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Speaking of which, has anyone made an open source pretty
| printed input interface for sage or do I have to keep
| flogging my old Mathematica 7 license for a few more years?
| akiselev wrote:
| _> Is this a record that should be set straight?_
|
| It's Wolfram. If they didn't claim to invent something
| fundamental in the first paragraph, I'd immediately assume the
| site was hacked or it's a poorly timed April fools joke written
| by an intern.
| [deleted]
| b215826 wrote:
| Notebooks are just glorified REPLs, and they've been around
| since the early days of Lisp.
| burkaman wrote:
| Seems like it's debatable depending on your definition of
| "notebook":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook_interface#History
|
| But also, even if it's true, it's kind of an offputting way to
| start the article. I know that's his thing and I know it's
| discussed every time one of these is posted here so apologies
| for the repetitive observation.
| abecedarius wrote:
| That wiki page says
|
| > According to Stephen Wolfram: "The idea of a notebook is to
| have an interactive document that freely mixes code, results,
| graphics, text and everything else.
|
| By that description Smalltalk with its workspace goes back to
| the 70s. (I don't know if there's anything closer to the
| Mathematica notebooks from that era.)
| relaytheurgency wrote:
| Very off putting. I hate to admit that I stopped reading
| afterward. I don't like to be that way, but there's a lot to
| read out here.
| donpark wrote:
| Having been there when it was first announced, I think his
| "claim" has substance. Mathematica clearly defined the
| "notebooks" UI as it is known today.
| fnoof wrote:
| Theodore Gray, cofounder of wolfram research, was responsible
| for notebooks I believe.
|
| > I wrote the Notebook user interface for Mathematica and led
| the user interface group for over 20 years.
|
| https://home.theodoregray.com/
| electroly wrote:
| What's the predecessor with a notebook interface from before
| 1987? I'm not aware of one. Wolfram loves to claim he invented
| stuff but this one might actually be true.
|
| The Wikipedia article suggests a contemporary in 1987 (MathCAD)
| but I'm not seeing a Mathematica/Jupyter-style notebook
| interface before that year. That would seem to have been the
| year of the notebook interface, and Mathematica 1.0 did come
| out that year with one. As far as Wolfram claims go, this one
| doesn't seem too offensive.
| stabbles wrote:
| Even if true it's unnecessary. I just can't read anything
| written by Wolfram without rolling my eyes
| nmstoker wrote:
| Likewise. Especially when it's liberally sprinkled with his
| catch phrase: "A new kind of..."
|
| It's unfortunate as clearly he has a huge amount to
| contribute. Maybe with an LLM someone can build a de-
| Stepheniser that takes in his pompous, smug text and
| outputs something more mellow and reasonable whilst keeping
| all the facts, which is what we are there for after all.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Of course it's unnecessary, but I suspect there's at least
| some substance to this claim. If it were anyone else, a
| harmless plug like this would be accepted by most, might
| even be an interesting nugget a reader would appreciate.
| The issue is the style of claim (being the originator) is
| dropped far more than it should be.
|
| I'm personally a fan of many ideas Wolfram pushes, just not
| a fan of the style they're pushed. I'd say I'm not in the
| minority, to the point it's a tired cliche.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| The only reasonable response
| taeric wrote:
| Community may not claim to be the first with notebooks; but
| they certainly seem to think they have something nobody else
| has with it. Per their website, "The Jupyter Notebook is the
| original web application for creating and sharing computational
| documents. It offers a simple, streamlined, document-centric
| experience."
|
| Which, I suppose I can cede that they are among the first "web
| applications" that do this. But I have a hard time really
| getting behind a ton of the discussion on it. Even talking
| about the "breadth and depth" of part of the python community
| is to ignore how much had been done for years in the
| mathematica community.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Jupyter notebooks were inspired by Mathematica notebooks (as
| stated by author).
|
| Jupyter notebooks are massively used in data science and AI
| research which eventually led to ChatGPT.
|
| Now ChatGPT is integrated in Mathematica notebooks.
|
| Nice circular situation.
| connordg wrote:
| One of the Wolfram/Chatbook developers here.
|
| I'm happy to answer questions or accept feedback about the new
| functionality.
|
| We're very excited about the potential of Wolfram technology +
| LLMs, and we've got a number of interesting projects underway in
| this area. Stephen's other recent blog posts linked at the top of
| the Chat Notebooks post provide a nice tour.
|
| The Wolfram/Chatbook[1] package mentioned in the post is freely
| available for any Wolfram 13.2 users. It's also open source and
| available on GitHub[2].
|
| [1]: https://paclets.com/Wolfram/Chatbook
|
| [2]: https://github.com/WolframResearch/Chatbook
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Can this be released as a plain ipynb add-in/extension?
| ComplexSystems wrote:
| What is the chat context length? Or, to be precise:
|
| 1. How long can a single chat input be? 2. If I am using a chat
| notebook with several previous inputs, when entering some new
| input below all of those, is it just appending all previous
| inputs together and sending the entire thing to the LLM? If so,
| how long can this be? Will it summarize if it exceeds that
| length? 3. What model is this using? GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 or
| something else? 4. What plans do you have next to integrate AI
| into Wolfram products?
| jerpint wrote:
| What LLM are you using in the backend? Is this an openAI model
| or a model trained by wolfram?
| julienchastang wrote:
| The next step in literate programming, I guess.
| Yhippa wrote:
| I love the concept of notebooks (as referred to in this article).
| It reminds me of the way HyperCard made it very easy for non-
| techies to create something that looks great to share out with
| the world. I'm honestly surprised nobody else has exploited this
| functionality before!
| detourdog wrote:
| At that time FileMaker was the HyperCard for data analysis.
| They could also interoperate.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Looks like it's time to restart Google Wave
| neosat wrote:
| Neat idea, but some of it is made out to be unnecessarily complex
| and esoteric. E.g. giving it your name, and now it becomes
| 'aware' of your name. I guess in normal programming that would be
| like saying once you declare your variable the program is 'aware'
| of it. It's not wrong to say that, but unnecessarily makes it
| more complicated. The tacking of multiple such instances makes
| the overall post more complicated than needed. The core idea is
| neat though.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| They explain why this is different (and more complicated) -
| emphasis added:
|
| > Thus, for example, if you evaluate x = 5 in an input cell,
| then subsequently ask for the value of x, the result will be 5
| wherever in the notebook you ask-- _even if it's above the "x =
| 5" cell_
|
| And
|
| > successive chat cells are "aware" of what's in cells above
| them. But even if we add it later, _a cell placed at the top
| won't "know about" anything in cells below it_.
|
| Surely this is because the OpenAI api is chat based and they
| need to evaluate that chat in-order. it does seem like an
| inconvenient interface for programmatic LLM generators if you
| don't want a chat UX.
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