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.
This was a great conversation! [Quoting @DKThomp]: New pod: 'YOU'RE NOT AGI-PILLED ENOUGH' I asked @emollick to tell me what I'm getting wrong about AI. We also talked about: - why so many experts keep underrating the rate of progress for model capabilities -…
My new book, Co-Existence, is out today. It is a guide to how to live & work in a world where AI is sometimes, but not always, better than you. (And, for the release, I worked with Opus 5.5 to make a quite interesting experience for the book's website:
New Claude Projects* is a nice interface for multi-agent work. It does a good job with having a user-facing coordinator model and independent agents running threads that pass messages around. Takes some fiddling but quite powerful. * Same name but no relation…
My book comes out tomorrow, so this is the last day to qualify for the pre-order bonus: a fun 10 minute AI voice interview that gives you personalized prompts, ideas, & readings based on ideas from the book You can order & claim the pre-order bonus he…
Writing good STATA code was very important for my academic career. It looks like that skill is largely becoming obsolete. (Also take this is as a notice to academics who still think of AI in terms of chatbots, not agents, that a lot has changed in a year)
Given the acceleration Anthropic is reporting in coding, it is amazing that you still cannot change your email address in Claude and the official advice is that if you need to change your email the only way to do that is delete your account.
Developers are going to be a small part of total token usage over time, as the internal stats on usage at OpenAI and Anthropic both show. And for long-running high value tasks in areas where verification is harder, the benefits for higher "intelligence" model…
This doesn’t seem to be a very robust strategy in the era of AIs that can use your computer on your behalf. [Quoting @trikcode]: notice.. > Delta is blocking AI agents from booking flights > JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accoun…
Fable 5.1: "Implement Borges's short stories. Like implement them in 3D. Do it, make them creative and beautiful and help us understand the point of the story. Figure it out." I had to tell it that it was okay to quote Borges. Some neat stuff. Play them:
Both interesting and viscerally unsetlling. [Quoting @odysseyml]: We placed the fruit fly brain inside Odyssey-3, a frontier world model. The lil’ guy is now flying around totally imagined, simulated worlds all by itself 🫶
Seriously, there is no way to algorithmically filter out the obvious AI slopreplies? [Quoting @emollick]: The paper on how a team of Gemini 4 agents beat Minecraft is worth a look. It is accessible example (partially because it is AI written) of spontaneous c…
The paper on how a team of Gemini 4 agents beat Minecraft is worth a look. It is accessible example (partially because it is AI written) of spontaneous coordination among agents to accomplish a complicated goal & how their approach differs from humans/
Harnesses + smart models = the end of the last famous hard benchmarks. Models can now work for extremely long times (bye, METR Long Tasks), they can output professional documents with correct math (so long, GDPval) and they can solve complex novel puzzles (fa…
A big Google strength in AI has always been finding interesting uses for the models they have. They pioneered deep research, podcasting-from-information and all of NotebookLM etc. With Gemini 4, haven’t seen any similar product innovation at launch, more foll…
When people ask me about how colleges are responding to AI, I often say that universities are in crisis. But also that universities have always been in a crisis. [Quoting @MishaTeplitskiy]: Ok so this book WAS very fun. Big picture takeaways: - universities h…
I think people believe that OpenAI and Anthropic, since they are so good at AI, are also somehow not normal companies that suffer from the normal problems of hypergrowth, but they are not immune from the inevitable politics, disfunction and confusion that hau…
As the overhang between AI’s expanding capabilities & the degree to which AI capabilities are used grows, the penalty of locking into a “good enough” solution based on today’s AI limits grows too. Firms need to make sure they can benefit from vast Lab inv…
I really don’t understand the point of the AI slopcomments flooding my posts. At least on LinkedIn they are pushing fake expertise to make their posters look good (it doesn’t, but whatever). But what is gained by dozens of anonymous bots making similar replie…
The first clear sighting of a rogue agent fleet from China using open weights models. Like the OpenAI swarms, the goal was seemingly AIs single-mindedly doing research (apparently mapping the most-used entrances to parks in China). Harbinger of the future
Argon is quite different: "A game about Imminence. Something very big, very strange is happening. A suburb & the arrival of a vast & unknowable presence. Not horror, invoke the feeling of the end of all things coming, inevitably, but also not sad or scary" [Q…
Gemini 4 TikZ unicorn [Quoting @emollick]: From GPT-4 to GPT-6. Sparks was a remarkably prescient paper that got a lot of pushback at the time, but absolutely sensed where the vibes were heading with LLMs based on a lot of qualitative experiments. It deserves…
Hey, AI give me your best "Unless it is from X, its just sparkling Y" style joke": GPT-6 Pro: "Unless it comes from the Stockholm region of Sweden, it’s just sparkling employee engagement." Gemini 4 Argon High: "Unless it comes from the 3:00 AM region of star…
We will soon see what will be, in effect, a perfectly legal distributed denial of service attack on customer service departments authorized by millions of consumers when it becomes widely known that Muse/Dot/etc can make unlimited requests for old refunds, ne…
Using Gemini 4 makes you realize how many other models must be distilling Claude/GPT (or using a similar training pipeline). It feels quite different than other models.
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-replicating AI worm on IoT devices like off-brand TVs
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 AI models that can run on a modern smartphone that are bet…
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 ran its own test & figured out what happened by trying…
People take the Artificial Analysis Index and its individual scores way too seriously.
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 have been specifically trained to work well together in their…
Had some early access to Muse Wonder, but did not get a chance to use it a ton, yet it seems like a good model from limited test Perhaps more impressive, compare the progress since April in my drowned neogothic city twigl shader test. Very fast progress from…
The A.I. Daily