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.
I had Fable/Opus build a hard science fiction starship combat game, with orbital mechanics, delta-v, heat, and realistic tactics, but simplified for 2D space with the hard math done by the game. Its quite fun to play (if you like this kind of thing):
Opus 5.5 was a good model in my early tests, first non-Fable/Astra model to feel like a Fable-class model, but still hasn't fully solved the dense language issue of the recent Claudes. Its version of the same shader (broken towers are a nice touch): [Quoting…
AI can be a really wonderful tool for exploring topics far from coding. I had Claude Fable 5.1 put together an annotated guide to Eliot's poem "The Wasteland," with multiple pathways through the poem, recordings, scholarship, etc. I am quite impressed.
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 people, not out of obedience to authority, but because…
I would broaden this to all social science. We are in uncharted waters. We need fast, smart research on AI that is deeply informed by AI's abilities, is forward-looking, and may not be fully nailed-down. This sort of work is not usually high status in fields,…
Claude not having an image generator is a gap in agentic projects that involve knowledge work. It is quite good at using code to draw or model objects, but image generators from Google and OpenAI give their AIs many more option for doing PowerPoints, mockups,…
Same question to Astra, slick results. It was notable that there was less simulated curiosity here. Like Astra ran the numbers (everything it shows come from its actual simulations), but didn't seem to be "interested" in the results the way Fable did, for bet…
Worth trying without spoilers. I asked Fable: "I want you to create a graphically beautiful game that is about zooming out... make surprising reveals the game zooms out" I gave no other directions and the results are engaging & strange (if uneven). Play:
Given the talk of AIs communicating via fluctuations in CPU temperature, I thought of this thread - there is more recoverable information in the world than you might expect. [Quoting @emollick]: Privacy is hard. Everything can be a microphone. You can recover…
Even if AI development stopped today, we'd have years of catching up to do. The gap between what current models can do and what almost anyone is using them for is vast. Here’s my post on The Overhang, and the four advantages that let people close it.
Epoch continues to do some of the best public benchmarking work on AI. This is helpful (and tells us how bad the state of benchmarking is, and how terrible some of our favorite benchmarks are) [Quoting @EpochAIResearch]: Introducing Benchmark Reviews: our new…
I think it is worth continuing to ask if the Labs just eat every valuable AI vertical, especially as their costs of product development drop lower and lower due to AI in addition to the advantages of direct pricing on token costs and access to the underlying…
I overestimated the difficulty of orchestrating massive numbers of agents. I assumed research would be needed to build working organizations of agents, but they self-organize very well (and politely) Here is a Fable coordinator in Claude Projects passing mess…
I had access to the new Claude Projects and was able to do some very complex work. Here, I asked it to go through all the images, videos and records about Umberto Eco's famous 33,000 book library & try to reconstruct it, including book locations, in 3D.
When I talk to nonprofit leaders about AI they often report widespread resistance from staff, usually because of environmental objections (that mix real issues & fake ones). It causes them frustration because they’re all under-resourced for their mission…
We have come pretty far from "every AI reference is hallucinated" (which still happens a lot if you use cheaper models): when I had an AI go over my new book to check for errors, it found an error not in my reference itself, but in the original article my ref…
Its fitting that one of the tells of AI writing is over-assigning agency and action to inanimate objects: "the code knows it now," "the plan remembers," etc.
When I talk to senior managers, increasingly hearing stories of the blurring of jobs inside organizations (we found this at our P&G study as well): coding, design, product management, all collapsing & overlapping as everyone uses AI We need new models…
Study from Google about AI use in science, complex impacts: acceleration (7 hours saved per week) along with shifts in the kind of work (more verification) and what research gets done (possibly safer topics). Also a good diagram of the jagged frontier
This is an excellent demo of an AI model designed to rapidly classify information according to decision rules, much faster and cheaper than an LLM. It is not an LLM itself and cannot output text or code, but if it works, has a useful role in systems. (Haven’t…
It is very clear that This Time is Different in terms of AI compared to previous innovations. That doesn't mean it differs in every way from past technologies (the s-curve of diffusion is surprisingly universal), but it differs in many ways that make applying…
I just remembered this thread where I was playing with GPT-3.5 (text-davinci-003) the day it was released, two days before ChatGPT. Less than four years later, and LLMs are at the center of US politics and investment in LLMs is at the center of the US economy…
Having Fable 5.1 Max and GPT-6 Astra Pro argue with each other over proposed translations of the famously untranslated Minoan language Linear A. (Neither of them appear to have cracked it, for what its worth). All the work so far at this Github:
I think once remote connections to “your” Claude or Astra or Claw or whatever become easier and more common, on-phone assistants like Siri will lose a lot of value. You want one smart AI managing everything with visibility into many systems & preferences,…
I don’t know what else happens as a result of the past few days, but I can definitely say that a lot of people who didn’t think much about AI are now freaking out about AI killing everyone.
Existential risk is obviously critical, but it is not the only AI thing that requires policy I worry it will become the sole focus. We don’t need better models for AI to have wide impacts on jobs & society and really need to be preparing to encourage good…
It is often startling to move back and forth between the world of organizations and the world of cutting-edge AI. Organizations underestimate AI ability growth (often by a lot) and the AI tech world underestimates AIs real world jaggedness (often by a lot)
As always, statements on X are a mixed bag and I have no secret knowledge to draw on, but if Google is able to return to the frontier on AI, it would definitely change the current AI dynamic, as it is a large, public, regulated entity with different goals tha…
Now that METR long horizons is effectively saturated (Epoch found pre-Fable agents could do 18 weeks of human work), what is the best quantitative graph that shows the current exponential progress curve? Frontier Math is saturated, ARC-AGI is saturated, Mille…
No matter how much you are hearing about AI, today is the least you will ever hear about AI. [Quoting @tszzl]: if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind star…
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