tbh wolfram alpha was the craziest thing ever. haven't done much research on how this was implemented back in the day but to achieve what they did for such complex mathematical problems without AI was kind of nuts
I doubt that if the underlying parts changed, anyone outside the industry or enthusiasts would know what that is. How many people know what kind of engine is in their car? I stomp on the floor of my Corolla and away we go! Others might know that their Dodge Challenger has a Hemi. What even is that? Thankfully we have the Internet these days, and someone who's interested can just select the word and right click to Google for the Wikipedia article for it. AI is just such an entirely undefined term coloquially, that any attempts to define it will be wrong.
I think the difference now is that traditional software ultimately comes down to a long series of if/then statements (also the old AI's like Wolfram), whereas the new AI (mainly LLM's) have a fundamentally different approach.
Look into something like Prolog (~50 years old) to see how systems can be built from rules rather than it/else statements. It wasn't all imperative programming before LLMs.
If you mean that it all breaks down to if/else at some level then, yeah, but that goes for LLMs too. LLMs aren't the quantum leap people seem to think they are.
Yeah, the result is pretty cool. It's probably how it felt to eat pizza for the first time. People had been grinding grass seeds into flour, mixing with water and putting it on hot stones for millennia. Meanwhile others had been boiling fruits into pulp and figuring out how to make milk curdle in just the right way. Bring all of that together and, boom, you have the most popular food in the world.
We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.
Would really like something selfhosted that does the basic Wolfram Alpha math things.
Doesn't need the craziest math capability but standard symbolic math stuff like expression reduction, differentiation and integration of common equations, plotting, unit wrangling.
All with an easy to use text interface that doesn't require learning.
TI-89 has surprisingly good symbolics tools and solvers for something that runs all year on a single set of AAA batteries. Feels like magic alien tech.
I used it a lot for calc as it would show you how they got the answer if I remember right, also liked how it understands symbols which ibv but cool to paste an integral sign in there
what do you mean by marketing? it's based on the year the version is pushed now. Which makes alot more sense at the end of the day and helps to know which version came when
I’m a fan of year based versioning, but this change is likely a response to Samsung doing this, which makes their Galaxy S25 sound newer and more advanced than the iPhone 16.
It’s a silly game to play. Firefox did something similar. Their versioning moved famously slow, then all the sudden they started releasing major versions every other week until their version numbering was compatible to Chrome’s version.
I think it's far more likely that they're doing it to reflect the fact that their products are essentially updated in synchronized waves, and you have to update all at once to get the best out of it (i.e. across macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS, if you own all those devices). This way each wave gets an obvious number so you know what matches what.
