You're using it wrong, you can use natural language in your equation, but afaik it's not supposed to be able to do what you're asking of it.

You know, "You're using it wrong" is usually meant to carry an ironic or sarcastic tone, right?

It dates back to Steve Jobs blaming an iPhone 4 user for "holding it wrong" rather than acknowledging a flawed antenna design that was causing dropped calls. The closest Apple ever came to admitting that it was their problem was when they subsequently ran an employment ad to hire a new antenna engineering lead. Maybe it's time for Wolfram to hire a new language-model lead.

It's not an LLM. You're simply asking too much of it. It doesn't work the way you want it to, sorry.

Correct, so it isn't a "ChatGPT of Math", which was the point.

Tell Wolfram. They're the ones who've been advertising it for years, well before LLMs were a thing, using English-language prompts like these examples: https://www.pcmag.com/news/23-cool-non-math-things-you-can-d...

The problem has always been that you only get good answers if you happen to stumble on a specific question that it can handle. Combining Alpha with an LLM could actually be pretty awesome, but I'm sure it's easier said than done.

Before LLMs exploded nobody really expected WA to perform well at natural language comprehension. The expectations were at the level of "an ELIZA that knows math".

No, “holding it wrong” is the sarcastic version. “You’re using it wrong” is a super common way to tell people they are literally using something wrong.

But they're not using it wrong. They are using it as advertised by Wolfram themselves (read: himself).

The GP's rocket equation question is exactly the sort of use case for which Alpha has been touted for years.