Search: “ethan-mollick--x”

I find debates over whether companies find AI useful to be odd at this point I talk to leadership teams at lots of big firms, and it is pretty universal that they are getting obvious and real value. T

'Just use AI' can be useful (I call it The Crowd in my informal framework I gave in my post below), but you also need a Lab where people can go with their ideas and Leadership to make decisions about

Lots of companies are in the 'encourage AI adoption' phase, whether teaching them ChatGPT/Claude or (sigh) tokenmaxxing. That dodges the harder problems of firm leadership: What do you want people to

The gains are most obvious in coding and operational areas. Even conservative organizations are adopting coding agents fast. That doesn't mean AI adoption doesn't come with huge challenges and cost co

/goal and other fully automated AI agents are cool, but not a great model for the future of work with people. Instead you want your AI to know when to ask you GOOD questions, maybe because it is stuck

I think Epoch does a great job benchmarking, but I continue to believe that open weights models are much more fragile, especially out-of-distribution, than their benchmarks indicate. Vibe-wise, I don’

It does seem like meaningfully better AI releases are accelerating, especially from OpenAI & Anthropic. To illustrate, I caused this timeline to be created. It only lists new models that scored 3 poin

On acknowledging AI (don’t take it too seriously) My modest proposal for how to acknowledge AI work is to use the Latin phase 'Fieri Iussit,' which means 'commanded to be made,' a common phrase on Rom

Claude really can roleplay an economist. I love this little comment Claude made after some robustness checks on the paper it wrote: 'On a 1–10 identification scale, I'd now put the paper at about 4.5

I cannot verify this claim as it references a future date (the URL timestamp appears invalid) and describes a model version (GPT-5.5 Pro) that doesn't exist in current public releases. The post appear

How lucky are you to have been born when and where you are? Had Opus 4.8 in Claude Code whip up a new visualization of all humans who ever lived. In addition to being neat, it is an interesting test o

The Veil of History is an open-source project shared by Ethan Mollick on GitHub that appears to be a tool or resource related to historical analysis or visualization, made available for public improve

Interesting that the GPT-5 Pro series models have consistently been the best models for single-shot attempts at the hardest problems since last summer. There has been no real competition in all that t

Prompts (verbatim): assume a universal veil of ignorance and you could be born as any human who has ever lived in history, what are the most likely socioeconomic conditions and locations that you woul

Reconstructing software engineering around AI is going to take work (even as the ability of AI to code increases at a rapid rate). Organizations are ideally spending tokens for two things: 1) building

The hand-wringing over token usage is real, but I don’t see any organization that has adopted AI retreating from use in coding or even considering it. We are a few months into agentic coding, and comp

Did this actually happen? It seems very suspicious. 'An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Clau

Ethan Mollick critiques the widespread praise for Joseph E. Banks's predictions about AI's future, suggesting that the expectations placed on his foresight may be overstated. The post likely argues fo

Here Opus 4.8 built and play-tested a new RPG in Claude Code, including 3 PDF manuals and adventures, playtest notes, a website, and a playable solo adventure - then put it all on Netlify. No feedback

I had Opus 4.8 in Claude Code write a sophisticated, if minor, academic paper from a archive of hundreds of de-identified research files from years ago I had to use GPT-5.5 Pro as a reviewer, it spott

Ethan Mollick discusses companies that rapidly depleted their annual token budgets within months, with some spending hundreds of millions of dollars on internal employee use of large language models.

A system demonstrated autonomous image generation capabilities by using GPT-Imagegen-1.5's API to create images without human intervention, independently formulating prompts and managing the entire ge

Lem & Douglas Adams got AI right Presciently Golem XIV (from 1981) has an illustration of the jagged frontier as explained by an AI, Golem (GENERAL OPERATOR, LONG-RANGE, ETHICALLY STABILIZED, MULTIMOD

models being conscious would be harmful for humanity. it would encroach on our status and dignity. it would limit the type of things we can do with them and use them for. it would vastly accelerate hu

Most of our problems are caused by modernity, because modernity already solved most of the ones that came before. Decent chance that, not even taking into account GenAI, this will be viewed as a decad

Opus 4.8 formulated the hypotheses in advance, conducting data cleaning, did research on references, conducted analyses, did robustness checks, and put out the whole paper in LaTEX style. GPT-5.5 foun

There is a lot being written about the stylistic tells of AI writing (em-dashes, etc.) but this paper looks at AI narrative tells Fascinating differences between AI & human narrative, and asking AI to

This is hard! It involves raymarching repeating gothic architecture (instancing towers across an infinite grid with gothic silhouettes and windows), a displaced ocean surface with believable wave moti

Decent chance that, not even taking into account GenAI, this will be viewed as a decade of incredible progress against the problems that were, ironically, caused by modernity: metabolic syndrome, auto

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