Search: “ethan-mollick--x”

In early May, the best superforecasters predicted that, by the end of the year, the longest METR 80% task horizons would reach 3-4 hours. In late May, Claude Mythos achieved that number. We also asked

Most people, including really accomplished people, don't have an accurate mental model of how LLMs operate (and why would they?) You see this in wide beliefs that AI is just copying from known sources

My timeline seems to have people surprised that U Chicago is getting Claude, but tons of schools (including U Penn where I teach) have school-wide AI There are lots of things that need to be figured o

HIPAA and FERPA compliant AI systems reduce institutional and legal risks when used by students and researchers by ensuring sensitive health and educational data are properly protected. Compliance wit

Ethan Mollick expresses skepticism about online posts that explicitly use words like 'genuine' or 'honest,' suggesting such language may indicate the opposite of what's being claimed. This observation

There are good things and bad things about AI in education & research just like everywhere else, but it’s also true that it’s not going away and that AI increasingly is becoming part of the tool set a

This story was so implausible that the only way it even (kind of) made sense if it is some sort of internal accounting placeholder at a cloud provider using their own compute. And even then it seems u

Ethan Mollick shared that a free game he deployed on Netlify consumed his monthly bandwidth credits in just one hour, forcing him to redeploy an optimized, more bandwidth-efficient version while prese

Another thing about AI writing is that while a single instance of AI writing on a topic may be fine, any situation where lots of people use AI to respond to a particular prompt (comments sections, hom

Big paper on AI coding agents using Github & other data The auto-complete tools (Copilot) led to 2.2x more code, local agents like original Claude Code led to 7.4x, & current remote coding agents 17.3

Here's the paper, which confirms that big changes are happening very quickly. Some really interesting approaches to teasing out what is happening in the software development cycle as well: https://pap

I wish the logos and textbox-at-the-bottom interfaces for Discord and Codex did not look so alike at a glance. I have confused the two a couple of times, leading to a confused GPT-5.5 and a confused g

It is difficult to know how good MAI-Thinking-1 is from the scores alone (like weirdly low GPQA & Terminal Bench 2.0) But Microsoft makes it really hard to try its models upon release (a general issue

Law professors wrote questions they were asked during office hours. Gemini 2.5 & humans answered them then other law professors blindly judged the results: -Gemini had a 75% win rate vs. professors -G

Since a lot of comments ask about it, they cannot really say anything about code quality using their methods. In part, the reason humans are the bottleneck is because humans are doing some sort of qua

The everything apps still look a lot like hybrids between chatbots and IDEs, rather than something built for general knowledge work. Too much assuming linearity & that final outputs are the only goal,

For those who wants stats, rather than anecdotes https://x.com/emollick/status/1983217724714066310?s=20 👀New data on the corporate ROI from generative AI from a large-scale tracking survey by my colle

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