Ethan Mollick

The AI landscape has fundamentally shifted from back-and-forth chatbot conversations to agentic systems that can independently complete multi-step tasks using tools, requiring users to understand three distinct components: Models, Apps, and Harnesses.

“Author of "A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era" in One Useful Thing”

AI exhibits a 'jagged frontier' where it excels at some tasks while struggling with others in ways that don't align with human intuition about task difficulty, and this jaggedness may persist even as overall AI capabilities improve, creating complementary work opportunities with humans.

“Author of "The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks, and Salients" in One Useful Thing”

A practical guide recommending users choose between free AI tools for casual use and paid $20/month advanced systems from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI based on their specific needs and use patterns.

“Author of "An Opinionated Guide to Using AI" in One Useful Thing”

Recent advances in context window size (Gemini 1.5's 1M+ tokens) and response speed (Groq's hardware) fundamentally expand AI's practical capabilities for real-world applications like document analysis and rapid instruction following.

“Author of "Thinking through opponent moves"”

AI has crossed a threshold where it can perform real, economically relevant work comparable to human experts on individual tasks, though not yet ready to replace entire jobs due to jagged capabilities across complex workflows.

“Author of "Real AI Agents and Real Work"”

Mass Intelligence is emerging as powerful AI models become increasingly accessible to ordinary users through improved interfaces, model routing, and free access to advanced reasoning capabilities previously restricted to paying customers.

“Author of "Mass Intelligence" in One Useful Thing”

The Pentagon's demand for blanket AI approval from companies like Anthropic without transparency, combined with threats to label them supply chain risks, creates dangerous misalignments over military AI use policies including autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance.

“Quoted on government and nonprofit adoption of transformational AI”

Companies are capturing only modest gains from AI adoption despite individual workers reporting significant productivity improvements, because organizational innovation muscles have atrophied and each company must discover its own AI integration approach.

“Developed a leadership framework for AI adoption in companies, identifying gaps between AI performance gains and organizational capture.”

AI may solve platform degradation and competitive races-to-the-bottom by raising average user intelligence, enabling people to see through manipulation and demand genuine value.

“Wrote about 'mass intelligence' concept where nearly a billion people now have access to near-genius-level AI models.”