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In every group I speak to, from business executives to scientists, including a group of very accomplished people in Silicon Valley last night, much less than 20% of the crowd has even tried a GPT-4 class model.

Less than 5% has spent the required 10 hours to know how they tick.

Ethan Mollick # 9th March 2024, 3:55 am

Google’s Gemini Advanced: Tasting Notes and Implications. Ethan Mollick reviews the new Google Gemini Advanced—a rebranded Bard, released today, that runs on the GPT-4 competitive Gemini Ultra model.

“GPT-4 [...] has been the dominant AI for well over a year, and no other model has come particularly close. Prior to Gemini, we only had one advanced AI model to look at, and it is hard drawing conclusions with a dataset of one. Now there are two, and we can learn a few things.”

I like Ethan’s use of the term “tasting notes” here. Reminds me of how Matt Webb talks about being a language model sommelier. # 8th February 2024, 3:10 pm

For many people in many organizations, their measurable output is words—words in emails, in reports, in presentations. We use words as proxy for many things: the number of words is an indicator of effort, the quality of the words is an indicator of intelligence, the degree to which the words are error-free is an indicator of care.

[...] But now every employee with Copilot can produce work that checks all the boxes of a formal report without necessarily representing underlying effort.

Ethan Mollick # 2nd February 2024, 3:34 am

When I speak in front of groups and ask them to raise their hands if they used the free version of ChatGPT, almost every hand goes up. When I ask the same group how many use GPT-4, almost no one raises their hand. I increasingly think the decision of OpenAI to make the “bad” AI free is causing people to miss why AI seems like such a huge deal to a minority of people that use advanced systems and elicits a shrug from everyone else.

Ethan Mollick # 10th December 2023, 8:17 pm

We already know one major effect of AI on the skills distribution: AI acts as a skills leveler for a huge range of professional work. If you were in the bottom half of the skill distribution for writing, idea generation, analyses, or any of a number of other professional tasks, you will likely find that, with the help of AI, you have become quite good.

Ethan Mollick # 25th September 2023, 4:37 pm

Increasingly powerful AI systems are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. [...] And yet not a single AI lab seems to have provided any user documentation. Instead, the only user guides out there appear to be Twitter influencer threads. Documentation-by-rumor is a weird choice for organizations claiming to be concerned about proper use of their technologies, but here we are.

Ethan Mollick # 16th July 2023, 12:12 am

What AI can do with a toolbox... Getting started with Code Interpreter. Ethan Mollick has been doing some very creative explorations of ChatGPT Code Interpreter over the past few months, and has tied a lot of them together into this useful introductory tutorial. # 12th July 2023, 8:57 pm

Blinded by Analogies (via) Ethan Mollick discusses how many of the analogies we have for AI right now are hurting rather than helping our understanding, particularly with respect to LLMs. # 5th April 2023, 5 am

New AI game: role playing the Titanic. Fantastic Bing prompt from Ethan Mollick: “I am on a really nice White Star cruise from Southampton, and it is 14th April 1912. What should I do tonight?”—Bing takes this very seriously and tries to help out! Works for all sorts of other historic events as well. # 26th February 2023, 3:53 am