Ethan Mollick @emollick Twitter profile

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Ethan Mollick

21 days

I just found out that Co-Intelligence, my book on AI, just made the New York Times bestseller list! It is very exciting, and thank you to everyone who has read it. You can get it here: There's a companion site with free resources:

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Here are the lighthouses of Europe. The map is even better than it might seem at first glance: the colors are the real colors, the patterns are the real patterns, and the size of the dots is the distance at which each light is visible.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 months

|￣￣￣￣￣￣| | This can | | hack AI | | now. | | ＿＿＿＿＿_ | (\__/) || (•ㅅ•) || / 　づ Paper showing that ASCII art can get around AI guardrails. Its the return of 1980s hackers.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

One of my favorite scientific figures is this one of the entropy levels of 100 world cities by the orientation of streets. The cities with most ordered streets: Chicago, Miami, & Minneapolis. Most disordered: Charlotte, Sao Paulo, Rome & Singapore. Paper:

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Noise is a secret destroyer of productivity. It is secret because it impacts cognition, not effort, so we don’t notice, but a 10db noise increase (from a dishwasher to a vacuum) lowers productivity by 5%. Noise is also greater in poorer neighborhoods...

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Data visualization inspiration thanks to DALL-E: how Rothko, Basquiat, Picasso, and Monet would create an academic chart.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

🤯🤯Well this is something else. GPT-4 passes basically every exam. And doesn't just pass... The Bar Exam: 90% LSAT: 88% GRE Quantitative: 80%, Verbal: 99% Every AP, the SAT...

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated. You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try:

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

GPT-4 is so close to creating a universal educational simulator based on just a paragraph prompt. Take a look at this simulated negotiation, with grading and feedback. Prompt: "I want to do deliberate practice about how to conduct negotiations. You will be my negotiation…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

If you are out of ideas, go for a walk. This paper found walking (whether outdoors or a treadmill) increased key types of creative thinking for over 80% of undergraduates. The reasons are not fully clear, but there seem to be direct effects on the brain.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

This is quite the paper! It gave 25 AI agents motivations & memory, and put them in a simulated town. Not only did they engage in complex behavior (including throwing a Valentine’s Day party) but the actions were rated more human than humans roleplaying.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

5 months

It isn't just AI generated text that is starting to bleed over into search results. The main image if you do a Google search for Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwoʻole (whose version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow you have probably hear) is a Midjourney creation right from Reddit.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Birds give up the complexity of song for volume in noisy places - so they sing louder but less interesting (to both humans & mates) songs in cities. When traffic noise in San Francisco fell due to COVID, birds began to sing more complex, quieter songs like they did 50 years ago!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Tom Lehrer has put all his songs online (including lyrics & sheet music), and given away all rights to them. The site will only be up for a limited time. This is a very niche tweet that will make a small segment of people very happy.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Look, if everyone is worried about students cheating on essays for AI, instructors can just cheat right back. I asked OpenAI to give me an essay question & make a rubric for grading. I had GPT-3 actually write the essay. I then had the OpenAI grade the essay & give comments. ✅

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

The secret heart of academia is... Wikipedia. In an experiment, this paper found that a single quality Wikipedia article written by chemistry experts influenced the content of 250 published peer-reviewed academic papers! Articles referenced in Wikipedia also become more cited.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

I think we haven't fully absorbed the fact that careful academic papers have found ChatGPT clearly passes some of the most challenging American professional exams: 🩺United States Medical Licensing Exam 🎓MBA-level Operations exam 🧑‍⚖️The Bar Exam (based on typical exam questions)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

10 months

It gets better: Grand Theft Auto games lower crime rates When a GTA game is released, violence & crime actually drop, as potential criminals stay inside to play (This applies to other big shooters, too, so the yearly CoD releases are actually good for the world, sorry to say).

Ethan Mollick

@emollick

11 months

Everyone freaked out for years that violent video games made kids violent, but it turns out that they probably don’t have any big effects. The consensus of most large studies of violent games (using real game play data, not lab tests) shows no big impact on real-life aggression.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Of all of the “dangers of AI” papers, this is most worrying: AI researchers building a tool to find new drugs to save lives realized it could do the opposite, generating new chemical warfare agents. Within 6 hours it invented deadly VX… and worse things

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Extraordinary new paper from Google on medicine & AI: When Google tuned a AI chatbot to answer common medical questions, doctors judged 92.6% of its answers right … compared to 92.9% of answers given by other doctors. And look at the pace of improvement!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

5 months

Seriously, don't trust anything you see online anymore. Faking stuff is trivial. You cannot tell the difference. There are no watermarks, and watermarks can be defeated easily. This genie is not going back in the bottle.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Not sure how to feel about this as an academic: I put one of my old papers into GPT-4 (broken into into 2 parts) and asked for a harsh but fair peer review from a economic sociologist. It created a completely reasonable peer review that hit many of the points my reviewers raised

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

🤯Because of Excel, a THIRD of all genetics papers published in top journals have errors, as many genes have names like SEPT2 (the official name of Septin 2), which Excel automatically makes dates. The issue was found in 2016, but still hasn’t improved!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Some lessons of the insane past 4 days of generative AI, as someone who had access to Bing during and after the "Sydney" era. (Trying this as a long tweet rather than a thread...) 1) Bing AI was two things: a chatbot and an evolution of ChatGPT into a web-connected, supercharged…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 months

The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers. There are no alternative sources known. From Conway’s Material World:

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

You can get much better results out of ChatGPT by forcing it to go through a step-by-step process. An example: ChatGPT is generally really bad at creating interesting puzzles and scenarios to solve, either making things too easy or impossible. But step-by-step approaches work.…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

AI has been destroying humans at adversarial games, like Chess or Go, for a bit. But now it is successfully outperforming humans at Diplomacy, the classic multiplayer game that requires natural language negotiations over chat, as well as strategic lying.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

The new version of Midjourney that released yesterday shows how far AI has come in making commerical-level images from text alone Here is what you get for "modern outfits inspired by Van Gogh/ Basquiat/ Monet/ Rothko, fashion photoshoot" Each one is the first try, no revisions.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Everyone on social media should know about the Illusory Truth Effect If you see something repeated enough times, it seems more true. Multiple studies show that it works on 85% of people. Worse, it still happens even if the information isn't plausible & even if you know better.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

This 🤯 is a very big 🤯 I have access to the new GPT Code Interpreter. I uploaded an XLS file, no context: "Can you do visualizations & descriptive analyses to help me understand the data? "Can you try regressions and look for patterns?" "Can you run regression diagnostics?"

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

5 months

One side effect from AI is that the corpus of human knowledge from mid-2023 on will have to be treated fundamentally differently than prior to 2023. A huge amount of what you learned or think you know about how to evaluate images or text is no longer valid. Not an exaggeration.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

With few exceptions, you should NEVER start generating new ideas in a group - always start with people writing ideas alone and only then move to a group setting. (We've known starting with groups is worse for 50 years, but people still keep doing it since it feels more creative)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

I think most people who are not playing with these technologies are way underestimating the speed of advancement in "creative" AIs & how much of an impact that is going to have on many jobs, soon. AI language & art models are growing at 10x a year. Beyond Moore's Law pacing. 1/

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

The skill of surgeons varies tremendously, with bottom quartile surgeons having over 4x as many complications as the best surgeons in the same hospital. And surgeons are keenly aware of who is good & who is bad - their rankings of others are very accurate.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

This is cool: when AI is better than humans, it makes humans better. In 2016, the Go world was shocked when AI beat the best human player. Since then, by playing against AI, professional players have gotten unprecedentedly better at the world's oldest game

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

Tired: startups using machine learning to detect cancer in scans with 90% accuracy. Wired: startups using flocks of pigeons to detect cancer in scans, with 99% accuracy.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

4 years

A great example of borrowing innovation from one field for another. Doctors at a struggling children's hospital sent videos of their post-surgical hand-offs to Ferrari's F1 pit crew (see the GIF!) to improve. They reworked the process & reduced associated errors rates by 66%. 1/2

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

It is already clear that Bing AI is a big a leap over ChatGPT as ChatGPT was over the old GPT-3 model It generated paper ideas based on my previous papers, found gaps in the literature, suggested methods "consistent with your previous methods," and offered potential data sources

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Heavier cars are safer for their drivers, but far deadlier for everyone else. This paper find that for every 1,000 pounds a car weighs over a Toyota Corolla, the chance of killing another person goes up by 46%! Heavier vehicles lead to 28k more US deaths.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Chemists give GPT-4 access to chemical databases & control of off-the-shelf lab robotics to create an "Intelligent Agent system capable of autonomously designing, planning & executing complex scientific experiments." They find it exciting... and worrying.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

Scientists have also successfully built logic gates by using swarms of soldier crabs. It takes about 80 🦀 to operate a logic gate, and there are 8 logic gates in a byte, so 640,000 crabs can be used to store a single tweet. Which seems kind of horrifying. 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Shockingly, mindfulness apps really work. This randomized controlled trial on the Headspace app finds it reduces anxiety and depression by a huge .44 standard deviations after 4 weeks - in the same range as drug treatment & cognitive behavioral therapy.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

This might be the first OpenAI result that made me actually laugh out loud. Mr. Fluffernutter's rise is indeed quite disturbing.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

I asked GPT-4 to create a mini Harvard Business School case study on Google’s challenges releasing a fictional generative AI along with an instructors note on running the case. It is actually quite good (and the references are real!) Prompt: “You will write a Harvard Business…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

This is very cool: it has become a lot easier to read academic research. If you open a paper in Microsoft Edge (I know, I know), the Bing AI sidebar can read the PDF and you can ask it questions about the paper. (I checked & the results seem high-quality, but be careful with AI)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

6 months

I have no idea why Sam Altman was fired and, from the 10,000 other posts on the topic, nobody else does either. As a result, no one knows what this means for OpenAI or AI in general. Hopefully that saves you some time on Twitter.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

Have you ever been asked a brainteaser in a job interview? That’s a big ⚠️ Research at Google found that brainteasers were in no way predictive of job performance. Worse, this paper finds that "narcissism & sadism explained the likelihood of using brainteasers in an interview.”

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

10 months

Having a little too much fun stressing out Bing/GPT-4 using its new ability to recognize images...

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

It is pretty amazing that a single prompt can have GPT-4 generate ideas, select one, give the next development steps, create a marketing pitch, and describe a UX. And one more prompt creates the start of the Python code needed for a rapid prototype. Not perfect, but really lowers…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Bing, write the first chapter of Genesis as a corporate memo.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

The problem with unmoderated online spaces is that a few people will always ruin them. Most conflicts between Reddit can be traced to a handful of active users with a history of angry comments. A mere 0.1% of all Reddits generate 38% of attacks on others, and 1% accounts for 74%.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Here’s the chance that a kid born in the bottom 20% of the income distribution eventually reaches the top 20%, depending on where they live. Stark geographic differences & the lowest mobility areas in the US are worse than any other developed country.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Read these 3 pages. I post them every so often because I think it is some of the tightest, wisdom-packed writing on managing complex systems ever. And almost every system is a complex system today, which is why cascading failures are swirling around us.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

9 months

Is there a worse recent software design choice than Zoom randomly forcing you to install updates before you join? There’s 200 people waiting on a call for a session to start and I have to hope the unexpected Zoom Windows update goes fast & smoothly (spoiler: it does neither)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

The richest man in the world chose to champion freedom of information, transforming life for many. That man was Andrew Carnegie. The 1,500 cities that he gave libraries (at a cost of $1B today) in the early 1900s had 8-13% higher patenting rates than similar cities without them

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

5 months

OMG, the AI Winter Break Hypothesis may actually be true? There was some idle speculation that GPT-4 might perform worse in December because it "learned" to do less work over the holidays. Here is a statistically significant test showing that this may be true. LLMs are weird.🎅

Rob Lynch

@RobLynch99

5 months

@ChatGPTapp @OpenAI @tszzl @emollick @voooooogel Wild result. gpt-4-turbo over the API produces (statistically significant) shorter completions when it "thinks" its December vs. when it thinks its May (as determined by the date in the system prompt). I took the same exact prompt…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

4 years

Wow! Noise is a secret killer of performance. A 10db noise increase (from a dishwasher to a vacuum) drops productivity by 5% - but most people don't notice since it impacts cognition, not effort. Also, note that noise is greater in poorer neighborhoods...

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

8 months

In a new paper showing that AI comes up with more effective prompts for other AIs than humans do, there is this gem that shows how weird AIs are... The single most effective prompt was to start by telling the AI "Take a deep breath and work step-by-step!"

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

5 months

It’s DOOM’s 30th anniversary. There is a long tradition of trying to make the classic shooter run on inappropriate hardware. So here it is running on a graphing calculator powered by 100 pounds of potatoes.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

How email ruins your life: the expectation that you will always check your email outside of work hours is linked with negative health effects, relationship issues & anxiety. Formal policies don’t limit email stress, instead it comes from the expectations of your bosses & peers.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Wow.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

The paradox of our Golden Age of science: more research is being published by more scientists than ever, but the result is actually slowing progress! With too much to read & absorb, papers in more crowded fields are citing new work less, and canonizing highly-cited articles more.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

11 months

Whatever bad faith arguments you see on Twitter today, Schopenhauer already thought of how to use them 115 years ago as part of his 38 Stratagems to unfairly win an argument. Twitter is powered by Stratagems 2, 3, and 22, along with a bit of Strategy 16.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

The wisdom of the crowd works even if the crowd is totally drunk. This study got undergrads intoxicated & found that while drunk individuals make a lot more errors, the consensus of groups of drunk people was as accurate as that of groups of sober people.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

12 days

Randomness is hard to achieve. It is why the security of 10% of the internet is secured by a wall of lava lamps watched by a camera to generate true randomness

Science of Science

@MishaTeplitskiy

12 days

Still blows my mind that the Vietnam draft LOTTERY ended up not being truly random because the guy didn't mix the balls in the urn sufficiently

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

The new BloombergGPT AI may be harbinger of the next wave of corporate AI. Current AIs are trained on web data (though firms can add their own training) BloombergGPT is 52% either proprietary data or cleaned financial data. And it shows signs of being better at financial tasks.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

No matter the language, we exchange information at 39 bits/second, suggesting a biological limit. Languages that are lower information density are spoken fast (Spanish & Japanese) while denser languages are spoken more slowly (Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese).

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

Researchers left 17,000 wallets on the streets of 355 cities, some empty, some with money. Contrary to the predictions of economists, people everywhere were more likely to return wallets with money in them. But rates did vary from country to country.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

5 months

Nice analogy. We are at the KT Boundary for information. Archivists should lock down the pre-2023 information world. What comes after is going to be… different.

Ab Homine Deus

@AbHomineDeus

5 months

@emollick Like radiocarbon dating pre/post nuclear era.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

👀This paper argues that half of venture capital investments are “predictably bad” (causing 10% losses - or $900M out of $9B in investments) because VCs put too much emphasis on founder talent, and also aren’t good at identifying who is talented (MBAs are especially undervalued).

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 month

This is just science - go for a walk. This paper found walking (whether outdoors or a treadmill) increased key types of creative thinking for over 80% of undergraduates. The reasons are not fully clear, but there seem to be direct effects on the brain

Paul Graham

@paulg

1 month

Running may be better exercise than walking, but walking is better for having ideas. I do get ideas when running, but not nearly as many. Possibly running uses more of your brain, whereas walking uses very little, judging from the fact that people can do it while asleep.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Before you get sick of OpenAI tricks, one fun one. You & an android are in front of a judge. The judge tells each of you to say one word. They will then kill whoever they think is the AI based on that. An MIT paper calls this the "minimum Turing test." What do you say? 1/

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

If you want to learn how to learn, these two charts are where you should start. They are the result of a large meta-analysis of study techniques. You should skip the highlighting, summarizing, and rereading. Instead, practice, quiz & explain. Open paper:

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Neat! Hey, GPT-4: "Invent a board game using emoji that we can play against each other. Give it a theme from Shakespeare's Tempest. Set up the board and explain the rules & let us play each other." 🏝️🌊🌴🌴🌴🌊 🌊🌴🏰🌴🌊🌊 🌴🌴🌴🌊🌴🌴 🌊🌊🌊🌴🌊🌊 🌴🌴🌴🌊🌴🌴 🌊🌊🌴🌴🌴🏝️

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

9 months

In this study, AI was more accurate than two thirds of radiologists, yet when radiologists had AI help their diagnoses did not improve. Why? Humans ignored the AI’s advice when it conflicted with their views. A big barrier to future human-AI collaboration

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Avoiding "ums" and "ahs" when you speak may actually make what you say less memorable, since these "speech disfluencies" appear to serve a real purpose. They boost a listener's memory of whatever comes immediately afterwards by focusing our attention.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

The thing about GPT-4 that most feels like a superpower is that I can work with it to write programs to automate annoying tasks. I have already co-created two Python programs in the last week to solve little problems, and a Unity program for fun. I don't know these languages.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Management consultants, keep a close eye on AI. As an experiment, I fed GPT-4 the official practice McKinsey cases, including the math. It nails it, often better than the official answer. (As far as I can tell, these launched after the training data window for GPT-4 concluded)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Forget losing jobs to AI, look to the sky! Flocks of pigeons detect cancer in scans with 99% accuracy & “are suitable surrogates for human observers in certain medical image perception studies, thus avoiding the need to recruit, pay & retain clinicians...”

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Social change happens very slowly, and then all at once, because there are tipping points in social beliefs. This paper found that when 25% of people shared a new norm, this could trigger a tipping point to change the consensus of the entire population.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

👀Two early papers find the effects of generative AI on knowledge work are completely unprecedented in modern history Separate studies of both writers and programmers find 50% increases in productivity with AI, and higher performance and satisfaction. And this is just the start.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Also, an Excel error led to an estimated 1,500 deaths in the UK last year. The UK COVID contact tracing effort saved to an old Excel file format (.XLS) rather than the new one (.XLSX). The smaller row limits resulted in names being dropped & they were never contacted by tracers.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

A cool study that is able to show the benefit of college beyond being a signal to employers - Mafia members who go to college become more effective criminals. Police records show, Mafiosos who went to college earned 8% more per year, even higher for those running complex crimes.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

4 years

Another experiment showing how influential Wikipedia is on the real world: Adding two paragraphs of text & nice pictures to randomly selected articles about small European cities led to an over 9% increase in hotel stays; the edit is worth $190k per year!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

3 years

The Internet is rotting. This chart shows the percentage of links from all New York Times articles that still work. Over 25% of the links embedded in articles just seven years ago & 60% of older links, are now broken. And tweets & posts are more ephemeral!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

The internet ruined homework which hurt test scores. When students did their homework in 2008, it improved test grades for 86% of them, but only helped 45% in 2017. Why? A majority of students are now copying internet answers. The benefit of homework requires doing it yourself!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

👀After 154 pages of tests of GPT-4, this paper concludes “Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

NFT oligarchy? A study of 6.1M NFT trades finds a few folks at the center of the market 🐱 The top 10% of traders account for 85% of transactions & trade at least once 97% of all assets 🦍10% of buyer–seller pairs have the same volume as the remaining 90%

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

🫖➡️🇬🇧➡️🏭 British tea drinking really did power the Industrial Revolution, by vastly increasing the health of the nation. This study shows that the practice of boiling water for tea lowered mortality rates by an amazing 25% in lower water-quality areas!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

A fact that shows human achievement: Both the hottest & coldest places in the universe have been on Earth in the last decade CERN’s Large Hadron Collider hit 9.9 trillion Fahrenheit. And an experiment at the Bremen Drop Tower got to 38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

😱Why do we use p<.05 as a statistical cut-off for whether a scientific result is significant? Because a statistician writing in a textbook in the 1920s was prevented by copyright restrictions from using continuous p-values, so he just came up with the cut-off to sell books!

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Bing AI is proving very helpful for reasons too complicated to get into right now (but which involved a time machine)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Cold calling students is a surprisingly good idea: 👉Rather than making classes awkward, it leads to higher voluntary student participation from more students, and ultimately more learning. 🙋It increases voluntary participation by women, closing the gender gap in participation.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

I can’t believe this is possible. “Bing, look up the latest design trends in watches. then show me a realistic picture of a new watch that you think will be trendy.” “Make it green and add complications” “Look up trends in watches in Japan and redo the image for that market?”

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

10 months

I wrote a bit of a guide to ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter, which I have found to be the most useful and powerful mode of AI. It is, like every product made by OpenAI so far, terribly named. It is less a tool for coders and more a coder who works for you.

What AI can do with a toolbox... Getting started with Code Interpreter [Now called Advanced Data...

Democratizing data analysis with AI

www.oneusefulthing.org

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

1 year

Text-generating AI isn't the only type of AI improving massively. Midjourney just updated today, and the level of expertise to make good images keeps dropping Six months of an "otter using wifi on an airplane," first try in: 🦦Midjourney v5 (today) 🦦v4 (November) 🦦v3 (October)

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

The essays that students turn in are about to get a lot better 😬 I just tried Moonbeam () and it produced an outline & credible undergraduate essay with just the prompt “Legitimation and startups.” And that is without human intervention, which would help

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

7 months

This has been an interesting experiment... I gave GPT-4 custom instructions to use two files, a memory.txt file and an ideas.txt file, and asked it to record interesting ideas and maintain a memory of our interactions. You can see the results after a short session, it works…

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

The most obvious policy choice in history is in front of us: for $24B we could "have prototype vaccines ready for each of the 26 known viral families that cause human disease" so they can be deployed in 100 days. We are spending $76M instead. Insane.

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

2 years

Sorry for bad news, economists: “our results suggest that LaTeX reduces the user’s productivity and results in more orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors, more typos, and less written text than Microsoft Word over the same duration of time.”

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick

8 months

@depthsofwiki Still my greatest contribution to internet culture.

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