Wolfram Alpha is an incredibly useful plugin for ChatGPT.
Since many don’t yet have access to the plugins, I demo’d it in this video:
Approximate Transcript:
This video is a demo of the Wolfram Alpha chat GPT plugin, I’m gonna try to go through all of the things that it says it can do. In this video and kind of show also somebody pointed out that you could click on the thing to see kind of how it’s thinking and processing, I’m going to try to do that as well. There is a little bit of a limitation here, while I have access to all the plugins, there’s two that I don’t the the actual the open AI plugins, the code interpreter plugin would dramatically enhance Wolfram Alpha as we would be able to use use it on our own data on large datasets, like an upload a spreadsheet, or a CSV or something. We can’t do that. So we’re gonna have to kind of play with that a little bit. But let’s work through this here. I’m actually going to do this one at a time. So mathematical calculations, I’m going to ask it some funky calculation. Let’s see what it does. Okay, here’s my through else’s done integrals. So let’s see. Let’s see what it does. Alright, so make sure click on this solve integrate the input response? It’s I can’t really, because it’s it’s calculations or is it steps? The creatively solving for x by finding the roots of the polynomial equation resulting from the blah, blah. I like that it’s kind of showing its work to some degree, it’s telling us what it’s doing. Really Sure. Pause for a second. These routes are expressed, oh, x equals? It’s been a long time since I’ve done integrals. I don’t recognize it’s possible. This is a limitation of kind of a chat thing here. I don’t really recognize the answer. But it seems like it’s giving me multiple answers. Maybe there are multiple x values that solve this. And I don’t really understand that. So maybe somebody who knows a little more up to date with math notation can give that to me. So, but that’s still pretty neat that it can do that. Because, you know, my understanding is that some of these integrals can be extremely complex and hard to solve. Okay, let’s try this as well, data analysis. So obviously, we can’t do the heavy data analysis, because we can’t input that much data. I could probably copy and paste from a spreadsheet, but it’s unclear how much of that would do. We could, you know, I will try that second. But let’s also do visualization. So we’re going to do is graph, please, we always want to be polite to our robot overlords, please graph this equation. Let’s see what it does. Let’s scroll down. And let’s make sure we can see what it’s doing while it’s thinking.
It created an image. And it’s going to show us that image, I think within here, the images look pretty good. Sometimes, I’ve had been able to get it to do even a 3d image, which is pretty neat, a 3d graph. Okay, did it not a bad job of that? Let’s try. Let’s let’s try doing creating a spreadsheet real quick. And then just copying and pasting it into here. Okay, so what I did was I downloaded the last five years of stock data for for Microsoft, let’s actually, let’s just do one of the the listings and let’s graph this. Let’s have a graphic and see if that works. Please graph the data. Let’s see if it was it might not be too much.
Curious if it’s going to put this in for every single input here. Oh, pause while it works through this. And I’ll show you the end result. It might be here a while because it looks like it’s inputting every line one by one. And this is five years worth of data. So you know, five times 365. You know, that’s what like 17 1800 different lines and it’s doing it very slowly. So give me a minute. We’re not sure exactly what happened here because it stopped showing its work here and it gave an error. Indeterminate string starting line comb wonder if it just didn’t like some of the data on 570. It’s just missing. Maybe it didn’t like that. It jumped dates for some reason, I guess I guess over the weekend, they did they just don’t. The stock market isn’t open. And maybe Wolfram Alpha didn’t like that. And let’s see what it said to create the group If Okay, so it only has a little bit of data, and it only created over a very short period of time. That’s interesting. It didn’t like it. I think this will be resolved quite a bit with the code interpreter plugin if I had that. So I’m not super concerned that it that it kind of barfed on the on the data. Well, it had a it had a break here. So it’s unclear why that would be an issue. Who knows why, what does this click on this cloud plugin? Okay, well, page it says page at the top page unavailable. Interesting. Okay, let’s go back up to the top and scientific computations okay, I wonder what the what we can do with this?
How about please calculate the next five dates when Mars will be closest to the earth. actually kind of curious about that
summarized it. Next five Mars opposition dates. I don’t know if that’s the correct term could not understand. Okay. Mars opposition date? So it didn’t understand that. So it’s digging a little bit deeper and trying to figure out what this is nearest opposition to Mars?
I wonder if this is correct. Let’s actually check this answer.
No, that’s it’s opposition dates. So 2020 to 2025 2047 2029 2031 2025 23 720. Okay, well, it looks like even though I don’t have the exact dates. Let’s see what seems about correct and wonder if they’ll give the exact dates? Oh, let me see if I can find the exact dates. This January 2025. Does seem to match up with January 2025. Right here? Well, there does seem to be a little bit of difference in the data. We have January 16 2025, and February 19. Slight differences. So it’s possible that there are disagreements in the CAC I don’t think so that should be a very precise calculation. So I’m kind of curious if this is correct, or that is correct, or if I adopt this, but if there’s some amount of disagreement among that. I do think it would be interesting if I especially if I were still doing like physics calculations, or chemistry or astronomy to actually compute these, I’m not really sure how to compute this exactly. So I don’t have really great ideas on what to do here. So I’m going to move on, I did think that it looks like it, maybe calculate those and didn’t actually just pull the data from somewhere else, which would be pretty useful, I think, in general, unit conversions. Okay, well, somebody told me that it was please convert it was 40 degrees Celsius, degrees Celsius into Fahrenheit. I don’t know how to spell that. I don’t remember how I’m sure that’s wrong
you know, this is something that chat GPT might be able to do. Really well. Fahrenheit. So that is correct. I wonder if I do. I just do it straight up like GPD 454 could do that. Let’s go back here. My spelling of Fahrenheit is very very wrong.
Okay, showed its work, not bad. So maybe not the best example, for conversions. I don’t really think that unit conversions is super useful, maybe in combination with other things just because there’s other things out there that do that very easily. Just go to Google and doodle can do that calculation involving dates times determined time zones and calculate durations between dates. Okay, so let’s have a calculate this. So please tell me how many years blah blah blah until the next leap day?
Oh, it’s actually doing it. Not quite exactly what I was looking for. But so it looks like there’s a Leap Day coming up in 2024. Let’s use Excel to calculate this actually. So we got this right here, we’re just going to do equals that minus that. So 311. Yep. Looks like it calculated correctly. All right, good job. Fact retrieval. This is interesting, famous people. Alright, let’s try something like, what is the population of Rome as of April 24 2023, this might actually involve some calculation. So I’m kind of curious how it’s gonna do this, instead of just pulling the data and might actually have to kind of extrapolate Rome population?
Let’s look up here. Rome is a city.
Hmm, it didn’t. I’m not sure how useful this is. Because it seems like you know, for old data, or for long standing factual data, GPT, four does just fine. And the Google search does just fine. Maybe integrating this into other things might be useful. I wouldn’t exactly say that. Either that or even the real time data, whether all right. Subject to the knowledge cut off. Okay, well, that’s not very helpful. How can you call this real time data? If it’s, you know, a year and a half old that? I don’t quite understand that I’m not gonna even test that because it’s just not accurate. Huh, I wonder if we could look at I got I got an idea. Let’s try this. Please graph the average global temperature by year from 1800 through 2021. Again, this would be this might be something that you would be able to do with the code interpreter plugin in combinations is actually two different requests in once it’s actually grabbing the historical data along with graphing it. So I’m curious to see how it does it. The code evaluation time out
all right. Let’s do this.
Oh, it’s still working? Oh, okay. I don’t need to do that
it kind of solved its own problem. That’s funny. That’s good. That’s that’s a really good time. Seems to have an issue with this. And wonder if we do let’s just do through 1950. See, if we make it a lot smaller if if it gives us a better answer.
Okay, it still seems to have trouble with that. So I’m gonna go ahead and move on. Let’s see. Language is the plug in to analyze language and text provide definition of words and performing linguistic analysis. I’m not sure how useful this is because I feel like GPT four is very strong at this. Very, very strong at this. So I don’t really see any, any like angle here that would be good for that. Unless it like combined data or math to some degree. Again, I don’t really see a way to test this. That would be separate from it’d be better than GPD forward anyway. If you have any ideas let me know and I’ll give it a try symbolic computations. Oh, this is inter First thing let me think of something. Alright, we’re gonna try this please solve for y in terms of x I altered this a little bit so that there’s a y and an X and let’s just see kind of what it does
seems to have interpreted it correctly. Okay, so there was an error and then it tried again it looked like it got it this time three possible expressions I did not do the calculation myself but hopefully those are correct if they are not please leave a comment below for what the correct one was I’m happy that it tried it. And I think that you know, the the ability to use math within the chat actually expands quite a bit on the possibilities of chap GPT because math is part of so much of our world and even just kind of simple math sometimes making sure that we get it exactly correct. Is very useful as it is actually are seemingly ironic on the surface but really not with you know how it works, but it’s a weakness of the large language models while GPT four did get that other one right and I think it is better than GPT three 3.5 at math this is bringing so hopefully this was insightful to you. Let me know if there’s anything else that I missed. I appreciate you still here if you liked this, like this and subscribe so that I can feed my kids. Have a great day. Bye