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Ethan Mollick quote, Sep 18, 2026

Professor, Wharton · Sep 18, 2026 · Post, The Overhang

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.

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

More from 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.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
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.Aug 31, 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

On the same topics

Quote
This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.Tomasz TunguzSep 24, 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
Once you have put all of your information into a personal agent and actually incorporated it into your day-to-day life, it is much more of a challenge to change to something else.Ben ThompsonSep 21, 2026· Post
Truly effective defense will mean truly trusting agents to act autonomously, but most companies won’t do that until they are forced to by regular and unremitting hacks by fully autonomous attackers.Ben ThompsonSep 21, 2026· Post
What this means is that model performance isn’t the only thing that matters: the integration between model and harness is where true agent differentiation is found.Ben ThompsonSep 21, 2026· Post
They also highlight the bifurcating economics of AI: state of the art models for discovery & optimized models for production. We use the largest frontier models to train new models, & the most capable models to architect systems. But once a system is engineered & hardened, running it thousands or millions of times through a workflow benefits from narrower AI.Tomasz TunguzSep 21, 2026· Post
About this quote
Said by
Ethan Mollick, Professor, Wharton
Where
The Overhang
Topics
Agents, Work
Company
The Wharton School
Source
oneusefulthing.org/p/the-overhang

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