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3 weeks ago | 
oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick
Two years ago, I was on a plane with my teenage daughter, messing around with a new AI image generator while the wifi refused to work. Otters were her favorite animal, so naturally I typed: “otter on a plane using wifi” just as the connection was restored. The resulting thread went viral and “otter on a plane using wifi” has since become one of my go-to tests of progress AI image generation. What started as a silly prompt has become my accidental benchmark for AI progress.
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1 month ago | 
open.substack.com | Ethan Mollick
Companies are approaching AI transformation with incomplete information. After extensive conversations with organizations across industries, I think four key facts explain what's really happening with AI adoption:AI boosts work performance. How do we know? For one thing, workers certainly think it does.
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1 month ago | 
oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick
Last weekend, ChatGPT suddenly became my biggest fan — and not just mine, but everyone's. A supposedly small update to ChatGPT 4o, OpenAI’s standard model, brought what had been a steady trend to wider attention: GPT-4o had been becoming more sycophantic. It was increasingly eager to agree with, and flatter, its users. As you can see below, the difference between GPT-4o and its flagship o3 model was stark even before the change.
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2 months ago | 
audible.com | Monica Yates |Adam Becker |Stephen Witt |Ethan Mollick
The question this book answers is, how can we use AI to unlock humanity’s full potential while protecting what is most precious about the human experience? As humanity takes its first steps into the Age of Artificial Intelligence, we are only just beginning to think through the possibilities and the dangers this technology brings. But we do not have time for leisurely speculation.
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2 months ago | 
oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick
Amid today’s AI boom, it’s disconcerting that we still don’t know how to measure how smart, creative, or empathetic these systems are. Our tests for these traits, never great in the first place, were made for humans, not AI. Plus, our recent paper testing prompting techniques finds that AI test scores can change dramatically based simply on how questions are phrased.
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2 months ago | 
ai-supremacy.com | Ethan Mollick |Sebastian Raschka |Timothy Lee
This list is not exhaustive but features many of the top AI Newsletters on the internet today. 📚 Some of the factors used in the ranking are total paid subscriptions (this is the main criteria) engagement relative to list size⭐ highlighting emerging writers (also check out the “rising” leaderboards in tech in the app)💭 simply my own personal judgment (while browsing Substack’s Tech and Biz leaderboards & analyzing who is reading who that is a huge Venn diagram in and of itself).
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2 months ago | 
oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick
Over the past two weeks, first Google and then OpenAI rolled out their multimodal image generation abilities. This is a big deal. Previously, when a Large Language Model AI generated an image, it wasn’t really the LLM doing the work. Instead, the AI would send a text prompt to a separate image generation tool and show you what came back. The AI creates the text prompt, but another, less intelligent system creates the image.
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Mar 22, 2025 | 
oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick
Over the past couple years, we have learned that AI can boost the productivity of individual knowledge workers ranging from consultants to lawyers to coders. But most knowledge work isn’t purely an individual activity; it happens in groups and teams. And teams aren't just collections of individuals – they provide critical benefits that individuals alone typically can't, including better performance, sharing of expertise, and social connections. So, what happens when AI acts as a teammate?
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Mar 18, 2025 | 
insidehighered.com | Ethan Mollick |Joshua Kim
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Penguin Random House Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan MollickPublished in April 2024How many artificial intelligence and higher education meetings have you attended where much of the time is spent discussing the basics of how generative AI works?
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Mar 11, 2025 | 
oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick
Influential AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote two years ago that “the hottest new programming language is English,” a topic he expanded on last month with the idea of “vibecoding” a practice where you just ask an AI to create something for you, giving it feedback as it goes. I think the implications of this approach are much wider than coding, but I wanted to start by doing some vibecoding myself.
