Thanks for taking the time to write this.

Yes, personalised education should be the future. Being self-taught myself and having taught several subjects over and over, I do believe that bots like this, as part of a structured learning path personalised to individual students' learning styles, paces and needs, can be more effective. They could be equipped with superpowers such as integration with Wolfram Alpha, access to the Internet and the ability to write and execute code, much like GPT-4, to provide support at each step.

I think it did quite well, considering it did not have any special training on Wolfram Language, nor was it given access to Mathematica documentations. So its knowledge of Wolfram Language might be slightly more advanced than ChatGPT. It should however know about various versions of Mathematica and several functions that Stephen has discussed in his blog posts. It could of course be given access to Wolfram Language documentations or even fine-tuned to better answer programming questions.

LLMs can easily mimic various characters and personas, so I don't think it would be very hard for them to replicate a specific programming style or follow a set of best practices and guidelines. This could be achieved through few-shot learning or fine-tuning, where many more examples of the desired output are provided to the LLM. This would then assist the model in recognising patterns and aligning with the preferred styles and guidelines.

Yeah, it's a great idea to use LLM bots like this to serve as a search engine over a one's archive of documented or undocumented knowledge.

The GPT-3.5 and the embeddings costs were not expensive at all.

Thank you again for your comment. Glad that you enjoyed it.

Fantastic post! Thanks a lot!

I am wondering how readily this could be used as a personal tutor/teacher at Universities. I have been teaching the Wolfram Language, Data Science, and Mathematical modelling for many years, and due to University regulations I had to record each and every session (there should be more than 1000 probably 2000 videos; each video should be 2 hours or so. Additionally there are lots of notebooks, and other texts that are relevant.

GPT-4 is able to help a great deal writing and debugging code, as well as interpreting data and building ideas for modelling.

The way we teach is not really tailored to an individual student due to class sizes. We also have many online students in different time zones. It would be great if this technology could give students a 24/7 personal lecturer - and replace me?

Here is an example (we need to keep in mind that GPT3.5 is not that good at programming....):

My question to StephenBot: "Can you show me some Wolfram Language code to compute the first 20 Fibonacci Numbers, then fit an exponential curve to it, and finally plot the data points in red and the fit in black in the same plot?"

The suggested code does not actually fit an exponential curve, but does quite well:

fibonacci[n_] := If[n <= 1, n, fibonacci[n - 1] + fibonacci[n - 2]]
fibonacciNumbers = Table[fibonacci[i], {i, 20}]
exponentialCurve = Fit[fibonacciNumbers, {1, x, x^2}, x]
plot = ListPlot[fibonacciNumbers, PlotStyle -> Red]
fitPlot = Plot[exponentialCurve, {x, 0, 20}, PlotStyle -> Black]
Show[plot, fitPlot]

I wonder if there is enough data available, whether the Bot would take the special programming style the lecturer promotes into consideration. For example, I very much prefer Functional programming style rather than procedural. Would it be able to mimic the "tricks of the trade"?

In a next step, of course one could think about the ideal combination of lecturers.

Once again: Thanks a lot for the great post.

Cheers, Marco

PS: Interestingly I have been collecting data of all sorts for many years. Apart from work related recordings, I also have months worth of recordings of everything I have said.

PPS: There are different projects to keep memories of historical events even after eye witnesses have passed away. How expensive was the training and especially the embedding?

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