Knowledge catalogue
It is entirely possible that the steady-state people will prove to be right in the future, but there's no sign of a slowdown yet. And if greater intelligence brings greater value at an exponential pac
Lots of advances coming from the open source harness movement (including Moltbook, RAG approaches back in the day, etc.) but they depend on the intelligence of the models created by a small handful of
One of the recovered passages, read for the first time in two thousand years: “Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…” Herculaneum
Ethan Mollick comments on how a new licensing regime will likely eliminate vague model announcements and promotional posting practices previously used by AI labs. The post uses literary language ('Goo
The talk around openness & AI needs to distinguish between the vibrant and innovative open source movement that is advancing the state-of-the-art on harnesses & other key areas and open weights fronti
As this post points out, contrary to what many say, the US government could absolutely effectively ban open weights models. That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to download the weights & run them, but
Finally, AI finds its ultimate uncontroversial use. A diffusion model trained on burger recipes 'discovers the classic Big Mac without explicit supervision and generates novel burgers optimized for de
Great experiment testing how good AIs are getting at very ambitious end-to-end coding tasks. Opus 4.7, in 14 hours, was able to build a software package that would take 2-17 weeks of human engineering
I feel like on X all you hear about is elaborate plans by firms to build their own AI stacks but in my experience companies are full of people who want access to Claude or ChatGPT and are pressuring t
If you want to read an interesting AI thinking trace, try 'I want you to suggest two poems that you think apply very well to the current state of GenAI models like you. Don’t just pick popular poems a
It may be obvious, but a lot of the first reaction to the gains in AI capability is going to be 'just muddling through' rather than executing on a rational plan. (this is what humans always do in rapi
Many companies could build their own Workday or whatever, too, using open source alternatives. They don't do that for a wide variety of reasons. Same dynamics apply in AI, only more so (upgrade cycles
Most companies are not even thinking about giving every employee a fine-tuned self-hosted version of GLM that they need to update and keep harnessed and build connectors for. There are lots of places
Ethan Mollick argues that regulatory frameworks for AI will not overlook or exempt open-source AI systems from compliance requirements, implying that future AI regulation will comprehensively address
Ethan Mollick compares Claude and GLM-5.2 AI models, noting that while GLM-5.2 excels in certain capabilities, Claude distinguishes itself through its self-reflective persona and other characteristics
I know this is a common thing to mention in some corners of X, but there is still so much focus on future model development & innovation bringing transformation that people are really overlooking the
If it was just military implications, that would be one thing, but if this is about info security at scale (as Five Eyes suggests), publicly understanding risks and mitigations is incredibly important
It would be very useful to understand more about the government safety concerns associated with frontier AI releases so we could (a) know what risks everyone will face if/when open source reaches Myth
State of the art in AI image generation less than 5 years ago. This is a pretty terrific computational image generator for making AI-created trading cards (or, heaven forbid, NFTs) The only prompt I g
The capability overhang from the models we have today is big enough that large-scale change to work and society over the next 5+ years is now inevitable even if AI development stops. (And there is no
This is a fascinating and important set of data which shows us where things are going, using OpenAI as a canary in the coal mine. The chatbot era is over, and agentic systems are coming to tasks beyon
This entry examines research showing a discrepancy between people's stated AI usage and their actual behavior, revealing that many individuals who claim they don't use AI are unknowingly or covertly u
Decisions about how to use AI in your organization are increasingly organizational design and strategy decisions, not IT choices: How do you integrate agents into your firm? What intelligence will you
Gemini 3 Pro was the first model to achieve at least 23% on ARC-AGI-2, which it did in November, 2025 (it actually scored 31%). So the 8-12 month gap between closed and open weights models still seems
Ethan Mollick shares a positive experience about how GitHub Copilot's Codex model has significantly improved his productivity by helping solve problems across multiple Windows machines, describing it
A case study in why organizations should both incentivized their employees to explore AI uses that help them & have a Lab of dedicated AI builders Here, Cornell's finance & AI teams created a /treasur
All Mythos-level models are likely to invite similar risks. Those risks will only be greater with the release of open Mythos-class AI coming in the next 6-12ish months (assuming China allows it) The l
This post likely showcases a collection of fantasy maps and diagrams, possibly illustrating world-building elements, geographic layouts, or visual designs from fantasy works or fan creations. The cont
Here's Sonnet 3.7 doing the same thing a year ago. https://x.com/emollick/status/1894441728175677837?s=20 Snake games are a bad test of AI beca- 'Claude 3.7, make a snake game, but the snake is self-a
I know they are pivoting to health care(?!) but there is still nothing like Midjourney for making strange and atmospheric images and short animations in ways no other AI image generator can do. Here a
This post likely discusses opportunities for significant gains or improvements that are readily available and easy to capitalize on for those with the capability or resources to act on them. The 'low
This post from Ethan Mollick likely explores how organizations can effectively implement AI through three key dimensions: leadership approaches to AI adoption, lab-based experimentation and testing, a
Classic short term thinking. What about the heat death of the universe? This paper shows we could survive 100 billion years past the end of all near stars, if we start building Dyson Spheres around mi
I have been trying Sakana Fugu Ultra-high and, first, it is incredibly slow: my typical coding tests (shaders, interactive scenes) take 30 minutes to run And the results are... fine. It does not match
Its been 10 days and the situation with Fable remains essentially just as confusing. (There have been many contradictory reports and articles and posts from different parties, which does not lower the
Prompt: build a really amazing snake game where the snake gradually becomes aware it is in a snake game and that gets integrated into the gameplay. many clever reveals but also fun to play. the game s
The thing that made Fable so impressive was its creative problem-solving and good judgement calls across long-running projects You can see this when I had it make a self-aware Snake game. I gave it no
Ethan Mollick shared content about creating unicorn graphics or illustrations using TiKZ, a popular LaTeX drawing package. The post likely demonstrates or discusses techniques for drawing unicorn desi
A fundamental problem with extending Codex/Cowork/Code to all knowledge work is that they remain very 'software-brained' where the end result (the software) is what is important & that code serves as
The interaction between AI & past scholarly work is going to get weird. Here I gave GPT-5.5 Pro a copy of my first published paper from grad school & asked it to find errors and update it. It found ne
This post references the foundational paper establishing Moore's Law, which describes the empirical observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two ye
This is aside from the other key 'software brain' problems of Codex and Code: dividing all work into front-end and back-end design, solving for the general case in a repeatable way, not testing or exp
What literatures have developed since the paper that are in dialog or tension with its themes or findings? (This is something that is very hard for academics, ensconced in a field, to do on their own)
AI is generally a weak fiction writer except for one particular kind of fiction (metaphor-rich, staccato sentences, short & plot light, etc.) which it writes excellently. This happens to be a style th
If AI self-improvement, even in a very limited way, is possible, the cadence of shipping both AI products/harnesses & models should go up. This appears to be happening at Anthropic & OpenAI, but not f
Some interesting findings suggesting that, by leveling performance, AI also commoditizes contract labor. New research: Is AI making employers view labor as more of a commodity? In a large online labor
I suspect that companies underestimate the value of using higher intelligence for tasks where weaker AIs seem to be good enough to hit KPIs at a lower price. At least build architectures where you can
This was perhaps the most controversial aspect of the guardrails around Fable, now being rolled back. Very pleased to hear Anthropic have walked back this policy https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/11/
This prompt demonstrates Claude's ability to handle complex, multi-layered constraints by requesting a rhyming poem with six four-line stanzas where each successive stanza progressively removes vowels
Ethan Mollick shared a comment he appreciated on Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform, though the specific content of that appreciated comment is not detailed in the available information. T
This post likely discusses the relative ranking or comparison of science fiction authors—specifically Stanislaw Lem, Douglas Adams, H.G. Wells, and Isaac Asimov—in terms of literary quality, influence
One thing I mentioned only in passing in my Fable post is that, for long running tasks, Fable starts to develop its own dialect as its many agents and tasks reinforce themselves and make Claudish lang
Science fiction authors in the order you want them to be right about AI: Iain Banks Becky Chambers Martha Wells Douglas Adams Charles Stross (Singularity Sky) Peter Watts Charles Stross (Laundry) Harl
'Switch to a cheaper model to save money' is a problem because cheaper models are worse (maybe they are good enough for a particular purpose, but still worse). More often a better approach is hierarch
The core problem with open weights is that the business model of frontier open weights AI does not look like open source, as there are very few cases where you can make money from closed ancillary ser
Ethan Mollick discusses cognitive fatigue and information comprehension, noting that after extended work periods, understanding complex or unfamiliar material becomes exponentially harder despite the
We need more real time data on how AI may be impacting the economy - this is a really useful addition. Today, the Stanford @DigEconLab launches the AI Economic Indicators, a new platform for tracking
Claude Fable efficiently processes tokens at high speed when initiating workflows, demonstrating rapid token consumption during execution. This observation from Ethan Mollick highlights the computatio
Who is the greatest scientist of all time (in terms of Google Scholar citations)? Is it Einstein? Or Bengio or Hinton? No. It is a humble servant of knowledge, Mr. Rachmad of Indonesia, who has had a
Both Anthropic and OpenAI mention the possibilities of slowing AI development in their latest 'what comes next' in AI posts, but say they need to be an action coordinated across the entire world using