Search: “ethan-mollick--x”

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

It’s pretty funny that I can’t tell whether the intelligent comments are from people who actually read the book or whether they are bots that know a lot about The Culture. AIs, even small models, love

Its The Graph again (not the METR graph, the one from the o1 launch). Although no logarithmic decay of ability with increasing compute... This is a general-purpose LLM. It wasn’t targeted at this prob

June 2024: The latest general-purpose LLMs could not count the r's in strawberry. July 2025: The latest general-purpose LLMs get gold in the International Math Olympiad. May 2026: The latest general-p

One interesting side feature of recursive self-improvement, to the extent that is happening, is that it makes the Big Three labs more appealing to talent, and shortens the runway for launching a poten

The frontier is still jagged though (here is Gemini 3.5 Flash messing up counting letters in words) https://x.com/RRiscio37389/status/2057193260745883962?s=20 @emollick Proof: https://gemini.google.co

Ethan Mollick posted a correction on X clarifying that he was referring to July 2024 in a previous statement or discussion. This appears to be a brief clarification post addressing a temporal referenc

Also had some early access to Gemini 3.5 Flash. Very fast for a flash model and very capable, though not as powerful as a full frontier model. I added it to the gallery or procedurally generated one-s

Another useful feature is this process can happen gradually as you reduce outsourced work as contracts end for internal talent. And company executives like this better because they can grow their own

Asking people whether they like 'AI' is not going to be a useful poll question soon, if it ever was. They will be incredibly grateful for their personal AI that guides them through medical or legal or

Fascinatingly Antigravity is actually the best tool so far at providing this sort of transparency, doing something by default that Codex and Code do not: offering a summary of exactly what it did at t

For those saying 'the tomato sauce blood from the sword wound that flying Shakespeare inflicted on the pizza robot while the otters discussed Spirit Airlines wasn't thick enough' or whatever... this w

Gemini Omni: 'a dramatic reading of Death by Water from the Wasteland by a man eating garlic bread while balanced on a unicycle on a small platform over a churning sea of tomato sauce in which, at the

Google has hidden thinking traces on the Gemini site. You have to use the 3 dot menu to pull up summaries, which are so minimal as to be unusable. Did it do web searches? Did it check results? You can

I had early Gemini Omni access: 'sea otter in a pilot's uniform explains why Spirit Airlines went bankrupt to a river otter who is distracted by their laptop while they are in a hot air balloon over N

Ethan Mollick discusses how a model's instruction-following capabilities and video processing abilities expand its potential applications and use cases. He emphasizes that combining strong instruction

Its a reason why there may be increased demand for some jobs disrupted by AI: when your local midsized insurance broker wanted software, there was no way they could even consider building internally.

One trend that I think you might start to see at big companies is insourcing via hiring: why pay so many outside vendors (legal, marketing, software vendors) when you can hire in-house and harness AI

🚨Our paper is out in PNAS: we found classic human persuasion techniques worked on AIs in a 'parahuman' way, making them agree to objectionable requests (upping compliance from 35% to 51%) It worked on

The Commonwealth Prize response to the AI-written story (and the fact that they still don't realize that there are at least 2 AI-written prize winning stories!) is a great example of the wide gaps in