Search: “ethan-mollick--x”

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

Fable: 'create a visually interesting shader that can run in twigl-dot-app make it like an infinite city of neo-gothic towers partially drowned in a stormy ocean with large waves.' 'Make it better' Al

Some fun examples, I just gave basic prompts and the AI executed: Balatro, but for coin flipping (all the design and ideas was Fable): https://play-flipside.netlify.app/ The best self-aware snake game

The fact that Anthropic may take away subscription access to Fable in two weeks is weird & discourages investing in learning about the model. Subscription use is how you figure out what the model is g

The New York Times published a roundtable discussion between @DAcemogluMIT, @deanwball, @clarashih & myself about the future of AI & who wins at work. I think it is a really nice overview of the core

One year prior to this post, o3 represented the most advanced AI agent available, marking a significant milestone in AI development. The statement reflects how rapidly AI capabilities have evolved, wi

Last time around Apple released a lot of information about how their AI version of Siri worked between local and cloud models, not so much this time It is nice to have a Gemma-like model on device, bu

The Matrix idea of keeping humans as batteries is obviously weird... we would be more useful as dice. LLMs default to very similar kinds of arguments & structure, and even different LLMs seem to colla

It is a really good time to store up a few of your hardest, most valuable, and most unusual ideas - whether for work, hobbies, or a new venture. Thanks to AI, really good & unique ideas are getting ex

As you can see 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 tha

One reason you want AIs to be better writers is that there is a lot of writing even in software, and it is incredibly painful to hit a menu which is filled with Claudisms or ChatGPTish phrases. A repo

The Gemini Pro models do not seem to be iterating anywhere near as quickly as Claude or GPT (last release was 3.1 Pro in February). Its causing a growing performance gap between Google and the other t

This chart from Anthropic is useful, since Agent Teams and Workflows are both very new and very powerful (and token hungry). On the other hand, maybe it doesn't matter as a lot of the decisions about

Also, a lot depends on Chinese labs continuing to ship open weights models. If they stop, the frontier falls further and further behind to those who want to use local/fine-tuned models. I think this i

At least until (if?) rapid improvement stops, it seems less likely someone is going to catch the Big Three AI Labs. Microsoft and Meta released their models, which were fine, but not frontier. SpaceX

A real problem with feeling the acceleration viscerally is that current models are really good and it is hard to feel the vibe difference on most individual tasks with new models, even as AIs continue

'As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s codebase was authored by Claude.' Matches independent measures. There really is no sign this is slowing down (which doesn't mean th

Based on anecdotal conversations with peers, there is enthusiasm for AI among academics in the humanities (while still being worried - rightly - about the negative consequences as well), but they gene

I actually read this & it is super weird, it appears to be an argument that prior machine learning systems (not generative AI) did not generate savings due to data issues so that will lead to a lack o

I think it is really worth reading this piece on RSI at Anthropic. There is a bit of navel-gazing, some marketing, and a lot of very sincere beliefs about what Anthropic thinks is likely in the near f

Ethan Mollick observes that both OpenAI and Anthropic's official documentation frequently falls behind their actual product releases by several months, resulting in outdated and conflicting informatio

Leaving aside the question of consciousness, the Ted Chiang piece has a reasonable point about moral atrophy if you let AI make choices. But it is also interesting in light of the fact that repeated r

See also: https://x.com/emollick/status/1799046218917822682?s=20 Alignment, of a sort: this paper conducts what they call a “moral Turing Test,” asking people to compare GPT-4o to humans on ethical qu

The capabilities of Claude Code and Codex have expanded a lot in recent months, they added many ways to approach work (subagents, skills, goal, workflows, plugins, etc). Given the AI labs can use thei

There are lots of issues with GenAI implementations but surveys seem to suggest broad positive ROI. Data & stories about AI failures are real and useful but need to be clearer about what they are meas

Had Claude Code build a snake game where the snake becomes aware it is in the game and then... stuff happens. Some impressive creative decisions by the AI (& also some very AI ones), I just gave a fir

Hey, its our paper! One of the most-viewed PNAS articles in the last week is “Persuading large language models to comply with objectionable requests.” Explore the article here: https://ow.ly/wOxl50Z6f