Search: “ethan-mollick”

Had early access to the Intelligent UI experience and it was a nice change from walls of text. It also suggests that, increasingly, we are going to see interfaces built on demand for the problem that

Context, OpenAI cracked or made important progress in hundreds of big problems today: https://openai.com/index/sharing-ai-progress-in-mathematics/ (And I am seeing rapid increases in the ability of AI

The challenge for Google post-Gemini 4 will be what they do with a good model. Anthropic & OpenAI show we are moving towards a single interface for many tasks with orchestrator agents. The Gemini 3 er

Google has the advantage, if they use it, of being able to observe where OpenAI and Anthropic are going with Codex/Code and get there now. Otherwise they are going to have to go through that whole lea

Not only did Astra beat Montezuma's Revenge, but so did Opus 5 But one of the criteria to resolve this AGI bet is for AI to win a discontinued prize that was sort of like a weak Turing Test. So Metacu

Yes, and there is a case to be made that OpenAI and Anthropic will do the best job of figuring out how to optimize AI cost/intelligence with combinations of agents of different ability levels that hav

GPT-4 was the undisputed best model in the world for a full year and we all debated whether anyone could catch up or if OpenAI had some secret formula that nobody else knew about. Now there are are 19

A worthwhile (and unnerving) reminder from Anthropic that we should be paying attention to AI ability thresholds, not just steady climbs In this case, the threshold is the capability needed for a self

This paper does a good job of showing the promise and gaps of autonomous AI scientists. Big question is how much more advanced models close those gaps. Today, we're excited to share early progress on

Another neat one: I had GPT-6 Astra build a model of a famous never-built building, Boullée’s 1784 Centotaph. There were only a few black and white sketches to work with, along with a description. It

A couple years later, with GPT-6. https://underdark-duel.netlify.app Apparently the mindflayer has a '101-bone skeletal rig' (This is 5E 2014 rules, and I didn't see major errors, though the mind flay

I am reminded of the fact that the infamous Milgram Experiment is actually quite weak because most people suspected the shocks were fake (kind of obvious in retrospect) & thus went along with shocking

Model personality matters in a way that benchmarks can't capture. Opus models went through a rough patch from around 4.7 to 5 where they just didn't feel 'Claude-y' anymore, more like an watered-down

The challenge for Google post-Gemini 4 will be what they do with a good model. Anthropic & OpenAI show we are moving towards a single interface for many tasks with orchestrator agents. The Gemini 3 er

Google has the advantage, if they use it, of being able to observe where OpenAI and Anthropic are going with Codex/Code and get there now. Otherwise they are going to have to go through that whole lea

GPT-4 was the undisputed best model in the world for a full year and we all debated whether anyone could catch up or if OpenAI had some secret formula that nobody else knew about. Now there are are 19

Ethan Mollick notes that image input represents the primary advanced capability of current AI models, and that tool‑use can effectively replace outputs from non‑omni models. He observes that multimoda

Fable, turn my tweet into a thinkpiece (this was pretty funny): There has never been a better time to have opinions about artificial intelligence. I say this with some authority, because I am currentl

An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with

It is not inherently bad to publish research on the impact of AI that only refers to older models, but it requires a very careful discussion and has to be very clear to non-technical readers. If you s

It may be that people also feel safer giving their personal data to Meta (since they already use it) than to other AI companies. If you do decide to try out Muse, a reminder that you can turn off trai

I think Meta's Muse is an impressive implementation of the OpenClaw idea of AI as a personal assistant agent that you have an ongoing chat with. Since it is so focused on doing that well, the experien

So much reporting on the Claude or OpenAI usage of the same handful of technology companies with competing products & huge cloud infrastructure of their own. There are many, many more firms out there

My AI agent doing proactive customer service: Someone emailed me that, after subscribing to my Substack, they were automatically signed up for others (which shouldn't happen) Without my asking, my Dot

So we now have a pretty good picture of the state of the frontier AI model makers. US closed source models continue to lead. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic stand well ahead of the pack, and may have si

Sovereign AI models lagging behind cutting‑edge systems risk significant disadvantages when applied to frontier tasks such as cyber defence. Ethan Mollick highlights that this penalty is most pronounc

I don't know if this news is real, but it does point out a major issue with 'sovereign AI' - if your sovereign models are far behind the frontier, then there is a substantial penalty to using lagging

People got upset at me for saying this, but there are no companies outside the US and China even *trying* to build frontier AI (perhaps Korea and UK are close), despite marketing claims. Governments s

This post likely features Grok (Elon Musk's AI chatbot) being used to explain complex concepts or vocabulary terms in simplified language for readers who prefer not to independently research definitio

Here is the same series of prompts in Grok 4.5 for a twigl shader of a neo-gothic city drowning in a stormy sea. (Had an interesting error initially where it made technically correct code that complet

Added Grok 4.5 to the Harbor Town Playable gallery. Here is it's 'build me a procedurally generated 3D simulation showing the evolution of a harbor town from 3000 BCE to 3000 AD, it should look beauti

Since I am needling every model maker tonight about minor but important issues, one more: Grok 4.5 has no model card. Companies that are trying to compete near the frontier should be releasing model c

That doesn’t mean you can’t get value out of Kimi or Grok or whatever, but it involves you actually knowing some stuff about how to optimize your setup, and a willingness to change direction to switch

It may be that people also feel safer giving their personal data to Meta (since they already use it) than to other AI companies. If you do decide to try out Muse, a reminder that you can turn off trai

I am reminded of the fact that the infamous Milgram Experiment is actually quite weak because most people suspected the shocks were fake (kind of obvious in retrospect) & thus went along with shocking

Yes, and there is a case to be made that OpenAI and Anthropic will do the best job of figuring out how to optimize AI cost/intelligence with combinations of agents of different ability levels that hav

Here's DeepSeek v4 Pro. Added to the playable gallery as well. Media I had a range of models 'build me a procedurally generated 3D simulation showing the evolution of a harbor town from 3000 BCE to 30

DeepSeek released a new open-weights model with strong benchmark performance, though Mollick notes that benchmark results may not fully capture the capabilities of open models compared to closed syste

As a joke I prompted Codex 'Build and run BenchBench, a benchmark of now good ai is at creating benchmarks. then figure out what benchbenchbench is and run that. and then write benchbenchbench up as a

On August 7, 2026 Ethan Mollick tweeted that “every remaining good AI benchmark score has an implied asterisk next to it which reads: * could be significantly higher with a better harness.” The commen

Interesting research suggests caution in determining which AI company is winning by looking at any one source.. OpenRouter seems to show open weights winning over time, but work submitted to Pangram i

The benchmark for non-verifiable domains is often the opinions of humans. That is how we determine whether writing or an idea or a pitch is good in the real world And we know how to measure & benchmar

Qwen 27B is really good local model but, when you use it, it is immediately absolutely and obviously nowhere near as good as the other models listed here for agentic tasks, and especially for the kind

Note this is separate from privacy - you can make sure your data is not used for training by turning that off in OpenAI and Claude. You can also use an open weights model, but as they continue to impr

I feel like the data sovereignty movement for firms is going to run headlong into the challenge that maintaining fine-tuned small models in a way that continually beats larger general-purpose models i