Ethan Mollick is a scholar who writes about AI and work, and author of Co-Intelligence. His recent posts cover working with models like Opus 5.5 through interim checkpoints, a realtime Genie 4 demo, open-weights models falling behind closed ones, and OpenAI retiring products within months. He also discusses AI unlocking legacy software migration, how AI changes scientific research, and industrialization versus craft from his new book.
The Pro series of GPT models continues to be really impressive for one-shot problems that involve complex calculations, references, or sophisticated ideas. It isn't particularly fast (or particularly pleasant) but GPT-6 Pro gives that "ask one question of the…
For Halloween, I asked Opus 5.5 to suggest a spooky project based on my existing work, and it came up with the idea of the ghost census. Pick a location and see how many people died within a 100 meters of it through all of history up to a century ago.
The market for software migration from legacy systems has been limited to $30B a year or so because migration is very expensive and maintenance is easier. Talking to older firms, there is a real backlog of scoped cheaper migration projects being unlocked by A…
OpenAI kills a lot of its products Sora lasted 6 months, Agent Builder 8 months, Group Chat 8 months, Atlas 9 months... Most of the time (Sora excepted?) their own product became obsolete within months, in case you think they are immune to misjudging the expo…
Sadly, I think the answer is no. Join some private Discords with real humans and hold the line there. [Quoting @MikeIsaac]: reddit basically one of the last places i search for human results and now google is shredding that. does the open web even exist in te…
I was interviewed in Vox about my new book, and a question on the meaning of work let me discuss something I have been thinking a lot about, comparing the logic of industrialization to the logic of craft: "You’re a hand-weaver in a world of power looms."
This is right, but I'd add that the distance between what someone who is working at the frontier with AI uses AI for and what AI can actually do today is growing even wider! We don't really understand the full capability of today's systems when properly harne…
One thing we don’t have a good measure of is the gap between the capability of the best internal models at the labs and the best released model to the public. I suspect it has been growing quite a bit over the course of the last year, especially after the tem…
This research gets at something missing from most debates about AI’s economic impact: coordination. Organizations are more than the sum of their best performers, so smarter individual agents won’t transform the economy on their own. Agents that can coordinate…
This is good advice for now to think about working with models like Opus 5.5. But it is often best to build in checkpoints where the model reports back to you with interim ideas or prototypes so you can guide & give feedback on the process, rather than on…
Academics have to invest tremendous effort into a single paper, so we often work on papers that we suspect will yield interesting & significant results. But that also pushes us to predictable work. AI has no such constraints, forcing us to rethink a lot o…
There has been a bunch of really interesting experiments with activating individual neurons in open AI models, locking them into particular personas. Here historian @ResObscura tries the same trick with a model trained only on data before 1930, and the result…
Artificial Analysis finally moves to closed benchmarks (goodbye GDPval-AA), and finds that open weights models are falling further behind than they had previously measured. Take with a grain of salt, but matches the general vibes that we haven't seen a Fable…
Genie 4: "Scene: A Victorian high tea. Character: A mouse in appropriate garb." "A porcupine walks by" "The mouse grows wings" "The mouse flies to the teacup" This is realtime & I can walk around freely. It is glitchy, but also impossibly advanced compare…
Important, but not unexpected, finding that experts working with AI agents are swayed by the positions of the AI, even if they think they are working independently. If your independent judgement matters on a task, you need to be deliberate about when in the p…
Genie 4 runs DOOM: "Walking through a typical office but every computer is running DOOM and all of the walls are also running DOOM and also everything is DOOM" "My coworker who is a demon appears" "He has a chaingun" "He gives me a bonus"
This never gets old (& also shows how hard forecasting AI is even for AI) “Hey Claude Fable & GPT-6 Astra, Without looking anything up, when do you think we will solve the Exponential Time Hypothesis?” (I only show part of the answers for space)
Two and a half years from this. [Quoting @danintheory]: We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory.
Given how out-of-nowhere it seems to many, it is astonishing that there was a small group of people who predicted with remarkable accuracy everything that is happening in AI today a decade ago (@kevinroose shows this in The AGI Chronicles). Many are now very…
My general advice for using AI for any purpose is to ask yourself: "how do I make what I am doing even more ambitious?" You do this until you either hit a wall and then you know the shape of the frontier (useful!) or you find out that the AI can do more than…
The website for my book redone with Opus 5.5. The initial version (made with Opus 4.8) required a lot of work to make a distinctive-looking static site. Now Opus mostly did this alone. We have come a long way from generic ClaudeDesign in a very short time.
Without being overly credulous, we should be taking seemingly “out there” ideas about AI cybersecurity from the Labs more seriously. Examples: Anthropic was mocked for saying Mythos-level AI changed cyber & @polynoamial for saying that models would find n…
The inventor of the term "prompt injection" suspects (as do I) that this may not be as large a problem in new models. This matches our tests suggesting that you can't simply prompt inject a request for higher grades in a paper, anymore. [Quoting @simonw]: @na…
We don't have a lot of evidence, but the bulk of the academic papers modelling the dynamic seem to suggest AI initially helps attackers more than defenders because of the low marginal cost of attacks in the short term.
Very useful prompt for Codex with computer use.
A visible sign of what AI insiders have been warning about since at least the Mythos release. Acceleration of attack and defense, at inhuman speeds, interacting with the very human systems that need to react to them. [Quoting @fiveoutofnine]: So basically, to…
This is an interesting question because the answer is not obvious. Which, by the way, does not mean AI coding tools are not leading to massive improvements, but, as research keeps showing, the bottlenecks to product improvements are often elsewhere. [Quoting…
Companies I talk to are struggling with the rate of patches they need to do thanks to AI defenses finding issues before the inevitable wave of incoming cyberattacks by other AIs. Now consumers are going to have the same experience of getting everything update…
Maybe, finally, voice interfaces in AI apps will kill the monstrosity that is the open office. Or just make them a lot worse as you. (Thread of research on the problems of open offices below) [Quoting @emollick]: The background noise in open offices, in multi…
I wrote about the exponential curve of the last 30 months of AI development: And I asked Opus 5.5 to create the ultimate response to the test I use for all AI image generation models (make a picture of "an otter on a plane using wifi"), it made this video
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