Search: “ethan-mollick--x”

Do you want your best engineers to use the most tokens? Your worst? Can you even figure that out? Are there some use cases to prioritize? Will your other engineers be resentful that they can’t burn as

Google has the only true Omni model, but the elements aren't hooked up. It appears it can take in & output audio, images. video, songs, text, code, etc. But right now each type of output is separate.

I have heard from quite a few large organizations that blew through their entire token budget in the first couple months of the year. There aren't even good processes for thinking through how token co

It is cliché at this point, but most people don't realize how capable the current generation of AI systems in their harnesses really are (And, as opposed to previous times where non-lawyers or non-mat

Most companies only have very crude understanding of token usage right now, so they veer from focusing on adoption (“everyone should use as many tokens as possible”) to cost control (“can we just use

The fact that tokens went from something no one even put in a budget line a year ago to an absolute requirement for coding now is the cause of handwringing, not that AI is not turning out to be useful

When they write fiction, AIs are obsessed by things that take or give memories, contracts with sentient inanimate objects, sets of secretive rules that govern conduct & which no one can acknowledge ou

Ethan Mollick proposes that the interrobang (‽) could serve as a distinctive marker of human-written text since AI language models rarely produce this unconventional punctuation mark. He suggests adop

An annoyance with Claude right now is that changes to the interface are badly documented, resulting in frustrating dead ends. For example, learning mode is migrating to a skill. Where is that skill? T

I don't comment on every article that uses out-of-date measures on AI ability, but I felt (probably wrongly) that the article was a response to my viral tweet, so I felt I needed to say something! htt

I found this Wired article on AI fact-checking frustrating. It could have been about why we continue to need human fact checkers (talk to people, use judgement, resolve conflict). Instead it is full o

I wrote a new post on what we need to keep human and what to hand over to AI, with forays into experiments in education, consulting, and the the latest controversy over literary prizes. https://www.on

In fact, I would be sympathetic to the conclusion that we probably need even more fact checkers, and much more of their time can be freed up to do complex and interesting work by using AI for first-pa

Infinite context windows seem to present a very large problem to using AI. Today's models already leak too much old information into current responses, a distraction that is part of why they are cogni

The closes thing is METR's very tentative update in February 2026, but the data is not high quality enough to know much of anything. https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/#other-means-of-meas

We aren’t going to do this again so quickly, are we? Rising demand results in higher costs. Higher costs result in lower demand. It is almost like some sort of equilibrium is being achieved. But there

We have, as far as I can tell, no good tests of the productivity impact of the autonomous coding tools that appeared starting in December 2025. Every paper out there is from prior to the Claude Code/C

Its very limiting that a big set of very hard problems that we have just lying around are Erdos problems. Don’t get me wrong, they are quite cool, but we really need hard problems repositories for man

As more people come to recognize the tells of AI, which mostly happens as you start to work with AI a lot, the scales are going to fall from their eyes and they are going to realize what some of us al

It makes many online spaces intolerable. If I want to talk to ChatGPT or Claude, I'll just talk to ChatGPT or Claude, I don't need to talk to ChatGPT and Claude pretending to be DoofWarrior123 on X wi

The post discusses the practical limitations of AI writing assistance, emphasizing that users must actively engage in the writing process themselves rather than simply requesting AI to generate comple

GPT-5.5 Pro is a very solid fact checker. I can throw entire chapters at it and it will hunt down every key reference accurately. The only real annoyance is that it loves nuance, so returns a lot of “

One of the easiest ways to show journalists and academics who have not used AI in awhile how far things have come is to throw something they know into Pro (or Extended Thinking) and ask for a fact che

And it is the model that makes it so it is the labs, as opposed to every other software vendor, can ultimately be the sole provider of products. Their post-training and their harnesses and their contr

I think people don't realize why Gemini Omni is different than other video AIs. It is fully multimodal, so it can edit video natively, too I took the famous 'train ' movie from 1896 & made it a bullet

I would push back a little: because the models are so good & improving, they don't have to be the product. But it is the model that is the prime mover. If they weren't so generally capable, the harnes

Its funny how much the whole 'strawberry' thing, which turned out to be o1-preview, was dismissed as overhyped at launch when it is clear in retrospect that it was way underhyped. A direct line from m

Not bad reply to a pretty open-ended prompt: 'this is the original train movie that supposedly terrified audiences. edit it so that it is as scary to modern audiences as the original was to its audien

'Strawberry' was OpenAI's internal code word for the extended reasoning capabilities featured in the o1-preview model, which enables the AI to work through complex problems with longer chains of thoug

Ethan Mollick comments on OpenAI's naming convention for their AI models, specifically critiquing the decision to call the o3 model 'o3' rather than 'GPT-5,' suggesting the naming scheme creates confu

Estimates of power usage here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20241 (these numbers also match independent assessments) Estimates of water usage here: https://eta-publications.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2

Everyone on earth will get really good chatbots for free, so thats good for democratization of AI, but really good agents that can do complex work burn thousands of times more tokens, and will be rese

I don't think anyone has a good intuitive sense about what this means, and that failure of imagination is a generally bad thing for planning, investment, and policy. I also don't have an easy solution

If this is true, using the best public estimates we have of LLM resource use, solving this Erdos problem took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity and about 3–31 liters of water. So that is less than three almo

In science, AI still does a poor job at finding interesting questions to solve in fields that don't have lists of known issues This has always been the hardest thing to teach PhDs: otherwise you find

Individual use is small, but at aggregate scale, resource usage is higher. By 2030, AI may use as much electricity as Japan. Water use will remain less than 1% of total US water use in 2030, but that

Math is easy* because it has verifiable outputs and few messy judgement choices to make. Which AI labs have the guts to make advancing social science a priority? It may actually do more for human flou

Parasocial was Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year in 2025. And with good reason. AI chatbots interact with us “as if” they were human. With @LennartMeincke, @danshapiro, @emollick, Lilach M., Chr

Seems GPT-5.2 reaches expert level in peer review: 45 scientists took 469 hours evaluating human & AI reviews on 82 papers. 'Surprisingly, current AI reviewers are competitive even with the top-rated

The post discusses how AI can be effectively used for peer review processes when combined with human reviewers, while noting that AI's capabilities in this area continue to improve. It implies that hy

We are quite short of compute, and that is going to result in compute becoming very expensive for complex agentic workflows even as single-turn chatbots get cheaper. So the richest companies & most pr

Did we ever learn what model won gold at the IMO from OpenAI? It was a year ago and it was called an unreleased internal general purpose model back then. Has GPT-5.5 Pro Extended caught up with whatev

Except the humans know that the Minds are smarter & they are content to leave all the big decisions (Contact, Special Circumstances, etc) to the AIs so they can do whatever they want personally aside

This entry discusses foundational concepts and context related to the Culture series, particularly the concept of the General Systems Vehicle (GSV) from Iain M. Banks' science fiction novels. The piec

Got to play with a little of this before launch as well. My experience as a social scientist was that it was more bioscience focused right now, but I think Google has been the leading lab in releasing

I am starting to have trouble paying attention to even interesting information if it is written in Claude or ChatGPT house style. I think some is the sameness of the rhythm rather than obvious tics: C