Home Speakers Ethan Mollick Quote Making great things with AI means knowing which AI outputs to keep, which to discard, and which to use as raw material for something the AI would never have generated on its own.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Ethan Mollick Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
In fact, the new GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 are already enough for transformative impact in large sections of the economy and they can reliably do weeks worth of human work when properly guided and harnessed. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
The capability overhang, the gap between what these models can do and what almost anyone is doing with them, is an opportunity because most people don't bring their own advantages to AI, and those who do get much more out of it. Blog The Overhang Sep 18, 2026
You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game. Instead, you want to use your human advantages as basis of working with AI to do things that neither of you could do alone. Blog Agency and Agents Aug 31, 2026
Agency is the initiative to act. Increasingly, it is going to determine what happens next with AI, and whether that is good or bad for us. Blog Agency and Agents Aug 31, 2026
But it does show that an agent can take a goal, make a plan, adjust that plan when it runs into trouble, coordinate across time, and involve real people without being asked. Blog Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence Jun 4, 2026
Being on that frontier myself, I can tell you that working with AI that is sometimes better than you, and sometimes hilariously worse, is not a problem you solve once. It is a relationship you negotiate, and re-negotiate, as the models get ever better. Blog Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence Jun 4, 2026
I expect that, increasingly, AIs will read my work and choose whether to recommend what I write to their human users. Blog Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence Jun 4, 2026
Software development is changing, and what is happening in coding is going to be happening in many fields. There are now important areas of work where AI outperforms humans, and yet, AI is far from perfect.
On the same topics Blog I do not want your brains to rot Sep 17, 2026
Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. And there is something about AI, about its allure and potency, that could make surrender far more widespread. Essay AI for All Americans Sep 16, 2026
When the people building this technology say your job, your children’s future, and maybe your life are on the line, they cannot then ask the public to welcome AI on faith. Blog Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factory Sep 15, 2026
Engineering specializations are disappearing, judgment and agency are more important, and it only takes one or two engineers for previously “impossible” rewrites and migrations to succeed. Letter The Batch issue 370, letter Sep 11, 2026
When you’re skilled at AI Engineering, your best work won’t be merely implementing a product that someone else spec’ed out. Blog When will average people feel AI's impact? Sep 9, 2026
For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months). Blog The coming product retention crisis Sep 8, 2026
AI is fantastic at automating tasks that have verifiable outcomes, which is why we’re seeing amazing strides from coding, mathematical proofs, and workplace productivity is an extension to that. About this quote 
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