Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick

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Professor @Wharton studying AI, innovation & startups. Democratizing education using tech Book: https://t.co/CSmipbJ2jV Substack: https://t.co/UIBhxu4bgq

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This is a fascinating paper that suggests that AI agents can indeed be used for social science experiments, but that just using a chatbot isn't good enough, instead prompts developed based on social science & game theory makes AI agent actions predictive of real human outcomes. twitter.com/emollick/status/19...

This is disappointing. Purposefully underselling what models can do is a really bad idea. It is possible to point out that AI is flawed without saying it can't do math or count - it just isn't true. People need to be realistic about capabilities of models to make good decisions. twitter.com/emollick/status/19...

Monsters in the distance, shot in 1970s Kodachrome. If you want precision in AI images and video, the multimodal image generators (nano-banana, GPT-4o) & video (veo) are the right choices. But if you want to generate something unusual & serendipitous, nothing beats Midjourney.

The immense scale of AI use, combined with AI being a General Purpose Technology that can be used for many things, means that any story of a successful (or failed) AI use case is an extremely narrow view into a vast sea of successes and failures. Don't over-index on one story.

We can now say pretty definitively that AI progress is well ahead of expectations from a few years ago. In 2022, the Forecasting Research Institute had super forecasters & experts to predict AI progress. They gave a 2.3% & 8.6% probability of an AI Math Olympiad gold by 2025…

Veo 3: "a big broadway musical about garlic bread, with elaborate costumes and a sondheim-like vibe"

The current state of research on AI and education: Growing evidence that, when used as a tutor with instructor guidance, AI seems to have quite significant positive effects. When used alone to get help with homework, it can act as shortcut that hurts learning Still early days.

I thought my "otter on a plane using Wifi" benchmark was already done, but Veo 3 adds higher quality... and sound Here is "an otter on a plane using wifi on their phone, the flight attendant asks them "do you want a drink ?" and the otter nods" (One of the first set of 4 videos)

Very big impact: The final version of a randomized, controlled World Bank study finds using a GPT-4 tutor with teacher guidance in a six week after school progam in Nigeria had "more than twice the effect of some of the most effective interventions in education" at very low costs

I say this a lot, but the narrative that AI use is going to collapse due to data limits or costs or environmental factors or regulation or a "hype bubble" popping or whatever is not a useful position for critics. Development may slow (it hasn't yet), but AI use isn't going away.

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