One Useful Thing

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The recent history of AI in 32 otters

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.
Personality and Persuasion

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.
On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after

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.
No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation

Mar 30, 2025 | 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.
The Cybernetic Teammate

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?
Speaking things into existence

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.
A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3

Feb 24, 2025 | oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick

I have been experimenting with the first two Gen3 AI models, Claude 3.7 and Grok 3, for the last few days. They are the first models of a new generation, including models that are trained with an order of magnitude more computing power of GPT-4, so they are not just interesting in their own right but also tell us something important about where AI is going.
The End of Search, The Beginning of Research

Feb 3, 2025 | oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick

A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I've been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI's o1 was launched. These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive - AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed.
Which AI to Use Now: An Updated Opinionated Guide

Jan 26, 2025 | oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick

While my last post explored the race for Artificial General Intelligence – a topic recently thrust into headlines by Apollo Program-scale funding commitments to building new AIs – today I'm tackling the one question I get asked most: what AI should you actually use? Not five years from now. Not in some hypothetical future. Today. Every six months or so, I have written an opinionated guide for individual users of AI, not specializing in any one type of use, but as a general overview.
Prophecies of the Flood

Jan 9, 2025 | oneusefulthing.org | Ethan Mollick

Recently, something shifted in the AI industry. Researchers began speaking urgently about the arrival of supersmart AI systems, a flood of intelligence. Not in some distant future, but imminently. They often refer AGI - Artificial General Intelligence - defined, albeit imprecisely, as machines that can outperform expert humans across most intellectual tasks. This availability of intelligence on demand will, they argue, change society deeply and will change it soon.