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Ethan Mollick quote, Aug 31, 2026

Professor, Wharton · Aug 31, 2026 · Post, Agency and Agents

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.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Ethan Mollick

Quote
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.Sep 18, 2026· Post
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.Sep 18, 2026· Post
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.Sep 18, 2026· Post
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.Sep 18, 2026· Post
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.Sep 18, 2026· Post
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.Aug 31, 2026· Post
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.Jun 4, 2026· Post
I expect that, increasingly, AIs will read my work and choose whether to recommend what I write to their human users.Jun 4, 2026· Post
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.Jun 4, 2026· Post

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The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.Tomasz TunguzSep 24, 2026· Post
This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
About this quote
Said by
Ethan Mollick, Professor, Wharton
Where
Agency and Agents
Topics
Agents, Safety
Company
The Wharton School
Source
oneusefulthing.org/p/agency-and-agents

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