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.
If you haven’t made sure to turn on two-factor authentication on all accounts, have passwords with family in case you get voice calls asking for money, etc, now would be a good time. AI gains mean the costs of mass targeting individuals with sophisticated att…
It has become disheartening that the average replybot on this site has shifted its replyslop angle to asking interesting questions. It feels like actual intellectual engagement, which makes it somehow worse than just rephrasing the post with a "that's the par…
GPT-6 Pro finds supposed errors in academic papers all the time, just as part of other work. Confirming the errors & learning their importance would still take a lot of time today, but it will get faster. We don't have the right mechanisms in place to dea…
Rather suddenly, cyborgs are starting to dominate math research.
A mathematician makes an Opus 5.5 music video in response to OpenAI’s proofs. Pretty great. [Quoting @jplotkin]: It saved some for you. (One shot!)
De-skilling myself on doing CAPTCHAS and navigating dark patterns in customer service.
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 Metaculus has decided to recreate the test to confirm the criteri…
I speak to a lot of people about AI & not everyone gets how it can be useful for them outside of work So its a shift that when I talk to people using Muse or Dot, they often tell a story of how their AI did something proactively to help them, and it makes…
In an urgent care setting, the advice of the obsolete Gemini 2.5 Pro & Gemini 2.5 Flash (without access to patient medical records) were rated of similar quality to doctors by other physicians. There was no safety issues spotted. Models have gotten signif…
Less than 4 years later and the Pope & the world’s greatest mathematicians & the President are posting a lot about the direct successor to this model and what it means for humanity. [Quoting @emollick]: Write a rhyming wedding toast where the bride is…
Interesting to see, given the controversy over the OpenAI release of a series of proofs and what it means for the discipline of mathematics, that at least some of the OpenAI proofs seem to have kicked off extremely rapid iterative advances from a wide communi…
This document is going to be an assigned reading in college classes that cover this moment in time, there's a lot happening in a few paragraphs...
I think I wrote exactly that, and it is still right. Organizations are a form of narrow superintelligence. My university, or Walmart, can do things that a human cannot, often using complex processes no one designed explicitly. I will go further: the failure t…
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 you have. [Quoting @OpenAI]: GPT-6 and Intelligent UI, now…
Much of the world is based on the assumption that the future is like the past and an original meaning of “singularity” was a point where that relationship breaks. I don’t know if there will be one big Singularity, but a million little singularities across fie…
Time for every AI account to pretend they deeply understand number theory again to opine on the importance of the latest math breakthroughs.
I think most people who have been closely watching AI for the past few years are likely surprised by how relatively rare terrible AI incidents have been, given a billion users overall and hundreds of millions of corporate users. Doesn’t mean that will continu…
When people talk about AI easily replacing workers, I think about this ethnography of copier repair technicians in the 1990s. You see how work is complicated and improvised by workers and informal and badly documented. (But eventually technology did largely e…
Subtle problem with AI-written academic papers is that AI isn't calibrated for feedback. AI often just folds, but if you are sending a paper for review, challenges from peer reviewers should result in some attempt to defend your idea (while still giving up on…
Over the past weeks I switched a lot of my Cowork complex work to new Claude Projects (confusingly, it is not the same as the old Projects in Claude, instead, it persistently chats with a dedicated cloud VM). I found it to be much better in most ways, but not…
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 that are not direct competitors & whose use trends…
I've been complaining about some OpenAI choices tonight, so, on the plus side, I will say there is still no equivalent to GPT-6 Pro (just as there wasn't with previous Pro models). It both does really hard tasks in one shot & does a surprisingly good job…
The whole reset thing is really weird and only makes sense to a narrow slice of even people on Twitter. Everyone else expects to plan their usage in some sort of rational way and getting random prizes of tokens is kind of strange. Like what percent of the use…
I actually want personal operating systems optimized for co-working with AIs, including fine-grained ideas of security, easier ways to dynamically see & understand what AIs are doing, and independent secondary "audit" agents that check the results of the…
🎵 Wave of distillation 🎵 US labs say Chinese labs distill their models. And Europe's new “sovereign model” is fine-tuned on data generated by… GLM and Qwen. [Quoting @Aleph__Alpha]: Small bird, fast wings, Kolibri is here. 78B parameters. 3.46B active. Up t…
How do you picture a superintelligence (if true superintelligence could ever be real)? I like a trick from Dungeons and Dragons for running villains with 25 Intelligence: don't try to out-plan the players. Instead, whatever they do or roll, play it like the b…
So is there some sort of weird scam being conducted with X Money? I haven't turned it on, but occasionally I get a post of mine massively retweeted by bots saying "lets send him X Money" or something similar, and it makes me think there is some elaborate (cr…
I think my upcoming book, Co-Existence, might be the first to include a blurb written specifically for AI readers, in this case from @tylercowen (whom I thought AIs would respect) The book website (with elaborate pre-order bonus) also has a page for AIs:
"The best current evidence supports a narrow claim: AI may already be affecting the hiring margin for junior white-collar roles most exposed to AI, but this attribution is contested, and aggregate labor-market disruption has yet to appear in the data."
People asked for me to upload the Bitter Lesson video from this piece to YouTube, so here you are: [Quoting @emollick]: I wrote about the thing I underestimated most about progress in AI: its ability to self-organize to accomplish tasks. Also, what that means…
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