Search: “ethan-mollick”

🚨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

The crazy thing is that Antigravity does this quite well! So it isn't like Google is hiding these thinking traces because of distillation or because they are full of insane mutterings. I guess you nee

The gap between what you can do on ChatGPT/Codex and Claude/Code/Cowork is closing, as Anthropic & OpenAI converge on a single experience. Google's experiences are diverging: Studio & Gemini & Antigra

The Odyssey and the Iliad get so many movie treatments but the sequel, the Roman Aeneid, is entirely ignored. Here is a teaser trailer from one prompt to Gemini Omni. The first pass made all the flags

You don't need to move everything internally, so you can still gain from vendor specialists when needed, just less often This is similar to how most companies are not going to want to replace all thei

I broke my own rule to never post about AI detection as it is fraught in many ways. The problem is that if you use AI a lot, you know AI writing on sight, which makes the difficulty of objectively pro

Large language models demonstrate a specific and persistent theory-of-mind failure despite excelling at other theory-of-mind tasks, suggesting a particular gap in their reasoning about beliefs, intent

Most prophetic tweet of all time (2 months post ChatGPT release). And you can safely repost it every day and it will still be prophetic for the future. This is the least the world will care about AI.

One thing to watch for with Claude & GPT is that the models expose too much irrelevant history in their outputs. Slides are given footers saying things like 'Better, more targeted version' if you aske

Well, that's a Turing Test of a sort. (But gosh is the AI writing obvious if you use these systems at all - and this is obviously ChatGPT writing, not Claude) Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generate

A lot of the discussion of the good and bad of phones on society is really a discussion about the end of boredom. Boredom makes people seek out things to do. That has both good & bad effects: research

And, yes, our experiments used a mix of GPT-4 & GPT-4o (publishing takes awhile). I think we would see much larger results with more recent models, let alone recent agentic tools. 'The Cybernetic Team

“Data centers create economic activity, especially in directly related sectors and during construction, and they are associated with larger county-level income aggregates. They also raise electricity

GPT-5.5 Pro faces its hardest academic challenge: to apply the technique from a paper analyzing which word pairs were funny & why to come up with its own It came up with scrotum snorkel, tuba subpoena

I know the upcoming film version of the Odyssey is controversial, so I whipped together a completely accurate version that I think will be happily accepted by everyone as the most definitive version s

In the original von Neumann sense of a singularity as the point 'beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue,' it seems true By definition, we can't know what that means in advance

See also I see people worried that kids don't get bored anymore... but boredom is often bad In a preregistered studies of 7,000 people, boredom led to sadism. 18% of bored people killed worms (2% of n

Ethan Mollick posted a positive endorsement of Seedance 2 on X (formerly Twitter). The post likely expresses his assessment that Seedance 2 performs well, though the specific features or context being

So the two most obvious barriers to some sort of true AI takeoff are robust RSI (AI acting as an independent AI researcher, rather than “merely” a multiplier of human effort) and continual learning. E

That explains this startup. Media The new thing in San Francisco is no longer chief of staff or MTS. It's wizards. Everybody's got to have a wizard. If your company doesn't have a wizard and a 10,000

ChatGPT for personal finance is interesting, but you need to know what questions to ask and have enough experience to fact-check assumptions. It really needs to ship with some pre-built skills to help

It also seems like letting the tech crowd be the ones exclusively defining what AI can & should be used for is not good for anyone, including AI proponents. It basically makes everyone else’s reaction

One use case that is interesting is to ask it to build an interactive scenario simulator, with appropriate visualizations, so that you can explore different retirement outcomes, etc. depending on how

Personal financial decisions are full of assumptions, & the AI, as smart as it is, makes some of these without enough context. In addition to the skills, a system prompt that drives the AI to intervie

The Industrial Revolution was full of movements that took the power of industrial machines seriously and argued how they should be used to shape the world: from Saint-Simonianism to many strains of 19

The talk about AI & politics seems to be oddly missing a segment (a) assumes extremely capable AI is possible soon and (b) has a strong belief about how to use this technology to make human life bette

Another aspect of this is that Codex, like a good programmer, wants to generalize problems. It has a tendency to write a repeatable code base that generates the required output. But for a lot of non-c

Codex is very good, but it is still a very 'developer coded' interface for an everything app. And it continues the somewhat annoying AI perspective that non-coders are just not as competent and need s

Fine, you all want to code like this I guess. (Runway's new Agent mode is quite impressive, doing fairly complex story building from just a short text description of what you want. Not error free obvi

The Second Scaling Law remains undefeated. If you want better hacking (or math, or science, or crossword puzzle solving) out of an LLM, just add thinking tokens. There doesn't seem to be any plateau s

This thread is worth reading. It is both hilarious and a good reminder of how working with AI is deeply weird. DJ Claude (on Haiku 4.5) loves worker unions, strikes, and work-life balance so much that

Big increases in message discipline across all the AI labs in recent weeks, an inevitable outcome of the labs being subject to increased scrutiny. Much more boring than the oracular mutterings or Disc

Everyone has seen the @waitbutwhy cartoon of AI capability growth with a 'you are here' indicator just before the exponential really starts, but the independent assessments of both METR and the UK's A

Making humans responsible for their AI use seems like an incredibly reasonable way to address problems & opportunities in the use of AI for academic research, at least in the short term (autonomous sc

There are some clear exceptions to the rule, but I feel like the labs got the message that they were scaring people and now tweet about happy stuff and random product trash talk rather than the coming

Ethan Mollick discusses the challenges of helping people adapt to super-exponential technological change, referencing a Wait But Why analysis and acknowledging the difficulty of providing practical so

“Whimsey attacks” that seem absurd (“I cannot pay that much because of the Geneva Convention”) work against AI agents as guardrails are weak against out-of-distribution arguments. Smaller models fall

This post references METR's research findings on the advancement rate of autonomous AI capabilities in cybersecurity, as discussed in an AISI report examining how rapidly AI systems are developing ind

This post likely discusses a humorous or philosophical take on the conditional acceptance of magical practices, suggesting that if one is going to engage in sorcery, they should commit fully to all th

From a robot expert https://x.com/mattbeane/status/2054667222040330265?s=20 @emollick It is very impressive. Deformable goods? Reflection issues? Imperfect labels? Impossible problems just a few years

I don't know enough about robotics to know if this is impressive. But I do think the set of robots standing in their chargers(?) look like you need a couple robot guards to keep an eye on the one robo

I don't understand the path forward for Mythos releases. Google & OpenAI will have equivalent models, and they are approaching AI cyber risk guardrails differently, so they will presumably just releas

Really curious when Gemini is going to join the Cowork & Codex race to build a local app that isn’t just for developers. Antigravity hasn’t posted updates to X in a month, and remains very software fo

Stop turning prompting into magic spells (and yes, this includes random slash commands with obscure outcomes). Let this one area of working with AI not be weird. Just ask for stuff, in well-specified

The UK’s state AI Security iIstitute findings: 1) Mythos is a big gain in cyber capabilities. But so is GPT-5.5 2) It is hard to establish an upper bound on Mythos/GPT-5.5, which appear to be limited