Pedantic!
Pedantic! is a post by Ethan Mollick on X that likely discusses overly strict adherence to rules, technical correctness, or nitpicking in a specific context, possibly relating to AI, technology, or pr
Knowledge catalogue
Pedantic! is a post by Ethan Mollick on X that likely discusses overly strict adherence to rules, technical correctness, or nitpicking in a specific context, possibly relating to AI, technology, or pr
Ethan Mollick suggests that pedantic or nitpicky responses, while sometimes annoying, are not inherently problematic because they can be easily filtered out to identify more substantive feedback. The
Since I am needling every model maker tonight about minor but important issues, one more: Grok 4.5 has no model card. Companies that are trying to compete near the frontier should be releasing model c
Ethan Mollick discusses how AI systems currently lag significantly behind frontier capabilities, with the relative strength index (RSI) as a key metric for determining whether this performance gap wil
The metrics discussion at OpenAI is a little confusing to me. I appreciate the clarification about bad benchmarks, but they spent a lot of money developing a very good benchmark of autonomous model ab
They are the only US manufacturer that is also an AI Lab, which creates a unique opportunity to actually model how you transform a firm with existing workflows, processes, interfaces, and complexity i
This is confusing... Claude Cowork was a purposefully more secure (& slightly weaker) alternative to Code designed so non-coders couldn't cause too much trouble. I got that. But I don't understand wha
This is lovely. I had a fun conversation about vastness with a virtual William Sieghart which led to a beautiful reading of Keat's Endymion, and one about landscapes of memory and led to a reading of
Yes, AI has definitely made the cheating problem (including getting 'help,' not cheating) worse but the problem was bad already Doing homework improved final test grades for 86% of college students st
Added Grok 4.5 to the Harbor Town Playable gallery. Here is it's 'build me a procedurally generated 3D simulation showing the evolution of a harbor town from 3000 BCE to 3000 AD, it should look beauti
This appears to be a humorous or satirical X post by Ethan Mollick that uses an extremely long, rambling list of disparate topics (signs, processions, animals, landscapes, disasters, political events,
Didn't even have time to write up thoughts on my early access to the new GPT voice, but it is really good & much closer to the science fiction experience of talking to AI (in part because it is much s
Fable feels very different than Opus. GPT-5.6 feels like a part of the GPT-5 family. I developed a very complex set of heuristics about when to use which. Fable was often “smarter” but was also too se
This entry references a GitHub repository called 'annals-kingdom' shared by Ethan Mollick, likely containing code for an interactive game or simulation project available for experimentation and modifi
Here is the same series of prompts in Grok 4.5 for a twigl shader of a neo-gothic city drowning in a stormy sea. (Had an interesting error initially where it made technically correct code that complet
I found myself switching between Fable and Sol depending on task. Sol for back-and-forth tasks, especially when I had not yet figured out what I needed exactly, Fable for very long tasks where I could
I had Fable build another thing I always wanted, a full procedural fantasy kingdom generator with economics, trade routes, population growth, wars, lineages, and occasional dragons. First, I worked wi
Ethan Mollick shared feedback that Fable (likely an AI tool or platform) had performance issues on mobile devices, and reports that this problem has been addressed and resolved. The post suggests that
I often use Pinokio to download and work with local open source AI tools/models, and one neat thing is that it exposes them seamlessly to Code and Codex. GPT-5.6 actually found my local video models a
I was an early tester of GPT-5.6 Sol. I was asked to not share demos until after launch but it is a very good model. It is of similar ability, but quite different feel, than Fable. Fable wants to go o
Ethan Mollick reports that Mac trackpad issues have been resolved and suggests implementing a system where Fable monitors discussion threads for bug reports to address issues proactively. This appears
My big takeaway is that both Sol & Fable represent jumps over previous models and have opened a large gap with the next-best AIs. People will have preferences for one or the other, but if you doing an
Opus 4.8 https://x.com/emollick/status/2060042738637148470?s=20 I had early access to Opus 4.8. Was impressed by it. Here is Opus 4.8's one shot of 'create a visually interesting shader that can run i
Prompt: ANNALS — a living kingdom in a single file Working title behavior: the app titles itself per seed — 'The Annals of Vaelmere', 'The Annals of Osterholt' — because the central conceit is that yo
Shader: precision highp float; uniform vec2 resolution; uniform float time; uniform vec2 mouse; // ------------------------------------------------------------ // Hash / noise // ---------------------
AI obsessions, continued: the act of naming something, whether something is 'earned,' what 'carries' something else, strained metaphors, sitting with something (often an idea), an inanimate concept th
Even before the agentic revolution, prompting tricks stopped being very valuable, as our research has shown. The best approach to AI right now is to clearly specify your goals, your output, what 'good
I have been playing these world models/games since the first diffusion DOOM, and multiplayer at 20 FPS is pretty neat. 'A dream of rocket league,' indeed. Introducing MIRA. A playable, multiplayer wor
MAI-1 has no independent benchmarks yet, but the ones they released suggest it is worse than Sonnet 4.6. Not sure it is going to be great as a Copilot at Excel and Outlook, especially as there are alr
Sovereign AI strategies of all types are built on the assumption of continuous releases of open weights models that keep pace with the frontier, giving cost/privacy/control gains at the expense of onl
Ethan Mollick argues that the specific format used for documenting requirements or processes (RFP, PRD, SOP, etc.) is less important than the quality of the content itself, and recommends using whiche
The overwrought language of Fable is an ongoing problem in software and design projects where the AI is otherwise excellent. It just creeps into little bits of text and toasts and menus, even if you t
This is a key reason I don’t expect the flow of frontier open weights models to continue indefinitely, or even for very much longer. https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-overseas-a
Unsurprising but still big: MTurk is on its way out. Mechanical Turk was a mainstay of social & survey research through the 2010s, as it allowed you to quickly buy access to many representative humans
World models are very interesting. https://x.com/connerruhl/status/2074245101379846400?s=20 Do world models work as a medium for storytelling? Over the weekend, I wanted to see how far I could push re
Ethan Mollick discusses how token costs for AI systems shouldn't be viewed purely as expenses, arguing that some token usage represents research and development spending to understand AI capabilities,
Anthropic and OpenAI will increasingly be able to serve weaker versions of frontier AI (Haiku, Instant) at very low cost And owning the full range of intelligence means they might provide 'organizatio
Big gains in PotatoMonetBench from Opus 4.5 to Fable: 'There are two controls. One is slider, in which one side is labelled Maximum Potato and the other is Formalware, there are four positions. The ot
Ethan Mollick discusses Google's potential to develop frontier AI models, suggesting that Google has the capability to compete in advanced AI development if it chooses to re-enter or prioritize this s
I can basically guarantee you are not being ambitious enough with the work you are assigning Fable Start asking for the maximum possible thing to figure out the far edges of what it can do. After that
I talk to a lot of companies that still have active efforts to build GPTs. (It remains weird that OpenAI abandoned GPTs after rolling them out. They were the precursor to Skills & could have been a br
I wonder if Fable might do better at tasks it 'likes' than those that it doesn't. If you ask it to do something 'Fable-y' it reacts with enthusiasm and promises to overdeliver. Otherwise, it just gets
Interesting stuff. And the visualization at the end is worth trying: https://www.neuronpedia.org/qwen3.6-27b/jlens New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happenin
Less than 2 years later, with Fable: 'simulate an encounter between a mind flayer and a drow warrior of equal CR. Set up initial stats then simulate each move, including initiative, rolling dice as ne
Ethan Mollick discusses the configuration scope differences between OpenAI and Claude AI systems, distinguishing between global settings that apply across all uses, local machine-specific settings, an
This post likely discusses how AI-generated responses tend to flatten or diminish the creative, humorous, and unconventional character of unusual or whimsical social media posts. Mollick appears to be
(This isn't some sort of boosterish AI slop post, I really think the right way to use Fable is to start by asking for everything and find the shape of the frontier from there, rather than starting wit
With inference scale and research scale to drive efficiency, and ever-improving frontier models as brains, this would be a way for the Labs to undercut even open weights models. Some companies will st
Ethan Mollick shared an interactive web application demonstrating a simulated game or scenario that users can view and interact with directly through a browser-based interface. The project, titled 'Th
As working with AI agents looks more like management, we may want to consider large-scale management training for the AI era. The US government actually did this once, & the WW2 Engineering, Science,
This post likely discusses how rapidly frontend design trends and 'vibes' evolve in technology, suggesting that design approaches from just six months prior can feel outdated or obsolete in the fast-m
When people discuss China vs. US competition over AI it would help if they specified the grounds of competition because there are divergent beliefs on what the actual game is, or if there is a game at
Hey, Fable: 'No like 'AAA' in what everyone online thinks AAA is, you know what I mean.' This was pretty funny, there are lootboxes, EULAs, achievements, useless graphical settings, elaborate boot scr
'History can be written of monsters, and in them,' reads China Miéville's 'Theses on Monsters.' https://conjunctions.com/articles/china-mieville-c59/ as a society we need to invent another classic mon
Ethan Mollick, a prominent AI researcher and entrepreneur, posted commentary on X about poor quality or unhelpful AI bot responses to a particular topic or question. The post likely discusses limitati
We are leaving the Old Code Age, the Paleocodic, the artisinal code era, where if you needed a novel program, you would commission a local codesmith or code guild to hand-craft a work of code for you,
Ethan Mollick reflects on how future generations will be amazed at the complexity and scale of work humans accomplished using only traditional keyboards and interfaces, before presumably more advanced
What if the model is the router? I think people underestimate the ability of frontier models now, but especially in the near future, to delegate work on their own as needed to dumber, cheaper models.
Fable: 'Last and First Men is out of copyright. I want you to make a movie that features a reading of it with appropriate mixes of animation and images using access to the APIs you have (elevenlabs, h
Happy 4th of July everyone. I came here as a kid at 9 years old, not knowing a single word of english, lived on food stamps in section 8 housing. My parents cleaned houses while my sister and I collec