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Ethan Mollick

Associate Professor, Wharton School · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

academicauthor

Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Co-Director of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, focusing his research on innovation, entrepreneurship, and artificial intelligence.

55statements → 34claims → 24claims resolved → 63%fully supported → 3.89/5average certainty → 2.6/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources → 5said about them ↓

15 supported 6 partly supported 3 contradicted 10 not checkable as stated how the 34 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

10 predictions · 24 assertions · 9 opinions · 10 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 34 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 24 are resolved, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ethan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Mollick: OpenAI's $3B revenue run rate is largely an accident
“I mean, they're incidentally making three billion dollar run rate this year, I think by like just accident, but there isn't like a, there isn't really a product there right now.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 24:14 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Mollick: Penn grads raised more VC in 2022 than France and Germany
“More money went to graduates from Penn, from the school I teach at, and last time I checked in twenty-twenty-two than everybody in France and Germany put together.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 20:22 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
88% certainty 3
68% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.2 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.4 · precision 3.9 · compression 3.7

redirected or did not address 2 of 42 assessed questions (5%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

283 words/min while actually speaking · 8.6 um and uh per 1k words · 7.5 false starts per 1k · 26.7% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 12,563 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 5/10
pushed back at the host 4/10
setup questions received 20%

Everything Ethan Mollick said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Mollick: OpenAI's $3B revenue run rate is largely an accident
“I mean, they're incidentally making three billion dollar run rate this year, I think by like just accident, but there isn't like a, there isn't really a product there right now.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 24:14 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Held up
Mollick: Open-source AI safety guardrails will be breached immediately
“And I do think that open models will immediately have their guardrails breached.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 16:28 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mollick: Lean startup methodology fails during breakthrough innovation eras
“I think the problems of the lean method are coming home to roost. What every VC wants to see is, you know, and especially in like app facing stuff is they want to see product market fit. There's a method we have, right? You come up with like a, you know, rough…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 36:24 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mollick: Silicon Valley founders build narrow wrappers despite predicting AGI
“It is very strange from one hand for all of these people in Silicon Valley to be like, yeah, you know, AGI is coming. And then the applications they're building are like these very narrow, like, hey, I slapped something on top of llama. And you know, it's like…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 38:19 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mollick: No current startup will survive in an AGI world
“The real problem right now is every startup in the world is betting against AGI. Which I find really funny because all the funders are like, yeah, AGI is coming in the next five years. If it is, why are you funding these startup companies? Like none of them ar…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 40:01 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mollick: AI tutors cannot replace human teachers due to motivation needs
“People need extrinsic motivation to learn. It turns out that there's value in having an instructor guiding the direction of a class, that there's value in putting things into practice. So even an incredible AI tutor that knows you and loves you really well, do…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 47:29 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mollick: AI researchers lack understanding of their models' societal implications
“The people train the models are all computer scientists, basically. I mean doing computer science, And they don't have a huge idea of the implications of the systems.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 3:59 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mollick: AI progress will continue as workplace integration has barely begun
“Option one is this is it like the, you know, the models don't get much better or, you know, and it's sort of this whole thing sort of fizzles out. I think this is unlikely because I think not only will models get better, but also we haven't even started integr…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 6:21 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mollick: AI value accrues to skilled integrators, not compute providers
“The real value of the steam engine came from having skilled artisans in your factory who said, I've got this thing that can make power go back and forth. How do I create the gearing to connect that to my, you know, my spinning Jenny, my ammunition manufacturin…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 13:25 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mollick: Meta open-sources AI models to spoil competitors' businesses
“So Meta doesn't really want to make money from models. So they're going to spoil, you know, their rivals, right?”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 17:10 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Mollick: Penn grads raised more VC in 2022 than France and Germany
“More money went to graduates from Penn, from the school I teach at, and last time I checked in twenty-twenty-two than everybody in France and Germany put together.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 20:22 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Opinion
Mollick: OpenAI partially abandoned its world-changing Code Interpreter product
“Code Interpreter is, is a huge world-changing product for data analysts that got partially abandoned by OpenAI.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 23:15 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mollick: Using AI to cut headcount forces employees to hide AI usage
“And we're used to IT solutions being a cost saving measure, right? If I get a 30% of productivity boost, I fire 30% of people. Your people are never going to show you how to use AI at that rate.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 28:07 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mollick: Good human managers make better AI power users than coders
“So coders are often not the best users. Often the best users are people who are actually really good at working with humans.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 32:42 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Contradicted
Mollick: Major AI labs lack educators and fail to understand teaching
“And I don't think a lot of the AI firms know that I know this cause we're deep working with all of them on things like education and like, they don't really understand education. There's no educators there. So they don't really understand what teachers do. And…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 46:05 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Mollick: Research shows VCs are unaffected by pitch presentation skills
“There's this really interesting research that shows that venture capitalists Are not swayed at all by the quality of the speaker. Their ability to be a good speaker or not is absolutely irrelevant. Amateur and angel investors are swayed by that.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 55:05 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Disclosure
Mollick: His Wharton classes are now 100% AI-based with custom simulators
“My classes are a hundred percent AI based at this point. Students have AI mentors and tutors they talk to. They have AI based assignments. When they learn how to do hiring, I built, we built a simulator that actually makes them have to fake hire somebody and t…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 57:10 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Mollick: AI accounts for at most 0.1% of US power consumption
“Right now, one percent of US power goes to data centers, and maybe 10% of that goes to AI at most.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 59:30 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Partly supported
Mollick: AI is 81.7% more persuasive than humans in controlled experiments
“Like now on the other hand, we do find that AI is hyper persuasive already, right? In a controlled experiment where you do, where you're apps to be, you talk to a normal person versus the AI, you're 81.7% more likely to change your views, the AI's view than to…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 1:00:51 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mollick: Exponential progress in AI models will continue for a while
“I have gone back and forth on how much juice the technology has left, and now I'm back to the, it has lots of juice left, like the exponential continues for a while, and I think I was not clear on that for a long time.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 1:05:39 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mollick: AI automating middle management will cause a workplace meaning crisis
“What's going to happen that I'm very worried about is when you realize as a middle manager that AI does your work and nobody cares like, what does that mean for the nature of work? Like, how does that matter if people don't care? Like, if AI subs in and does s…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 1:08:16 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mollick: Open-Source GPT-4 Level AI Models Will Become Ubiquitous
“We now have an open source GPT four capable model and it's going to be everywhere.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 3:13 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Insight
Mollick: AI's 'jagged' capabilities prevent it from fully replacing human labor
“Like right now that, you know, as we talk about in our research, AI is jagged. So it's really good at some stuff, really bad at other things. So, you know, and as a result, it can't sub in for all of human work because on one hand, it'll do a great job and som…”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 9:35 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mollick: ChatGPT instantly obsoleted a bank's expensive custom GPT-3 tool
“I spoke to a very large financial institution, spent a huge amount of money building a GPT three powered sales assistant tool that as soon as chat GVD came out was instantly obsolete.”
Ethan Mollick Jul 31, 2024 ▶ 14:46 Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Show 24statements(31 left)

The other half of the tape: Ethan Mollick's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 4 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 5

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0032542024episodesmentions
0242024episodes it came up in
000.821.542024episodesmentions per episode
2024 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken Jul 31, 2024 51m
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