The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 55 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Mollick: Open-source AI safety guardrails will be breached immediately
“And I do think that open models will immediately have their guardrails breached.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
Mollick: Governments should adopt fast follow-up AI regulation, not pre-regulate
“It has a really nice model for AI regulation that I think is probably right, which is when you have a new technology, you don't know what the problems and issues are going to be. You do fast follow-up regulation. So you don't try and pre-regulate because you d…”
Mollick: Empirical research shows founders must move to Silicon Valley
“That's an empirical result from a bunch of studies. Companies that, you know, there's been a study of Israeli companies in the Valley, New York companies. Like, it's just, the issue is, is that that's where the connections are, and it turns out Zoom only gets …”
Mollick: Average distance between a VC and portfolio company is 40 miles
“I mean, the average distance, at least pre-pandemic, I would, I'd be surprised if it actually changed. The average distance between a VC and a company to invest in is about 40 miles.”
Mollick: Direct SFO flights boost local VC investment in destination cities
“In fact, when a direct flight is added between SFO and another city, the VC investment in that city goes up. Because it's just getting, it's easier to fly there and help do, ah, and do monitoring there.”
Mollick: Only 5-10% of professionals have used advanced AI models
“Five to 10% of people in any room, whether, by the way, Silicon Valley, actual people, right, who aren't at a lab, whether that's at a large bank, whether that's at a conference of innovation professionals, maybe five to 10% have used those models, and maybe t…”
Mollick: ChatGPT saves Danish knowledge workers 50% time on 30% of tasks
“A new study just came out of Denmark of people who are using chat GPT and, you know, in knowledge intensive work environments. And, you know, they're estimating that in, you know, over 30% of their tasks, they're saving 50% of their time.”
Mollick: ChatGPT adoption exceeds 70% in universities versus single digits elsewhere
“There's a reason why adoption rates are over 70% in universities for chat GPT. And while they're like at a few percent elsewhere in the world, we figure stuff out like this.”
Mollick: AI chatbots already write essays better than most humans
“Chatbots right now, like, if you want to see the future where it's better than human, it's actually in homework, where in most cases it kind of solves the issue, writes an essay better than most people.”
Mollick: Crypto made all technology feel like hype and short-term speculation
“I also think crypto did us dirty in this kind of front, which is like, it made all technology feel like hype. And it emphasized again, short buck return.”
Mollick: Unprompted GPT-4 math tutoring led to lower test scores
“The first randomized control trial we have, I have some of my colleagues at Wharton was giving GPT-IV people for math tutoring in Turkey. Now, they didn't do a huge amount of, like, you know, it was an assigned class, and they used the system, but it turns out…”
Mollick: AI tutors will enable flipped classrooms with larger class sizes
“I think in the long term we'll have flipped classrooms where that 20 per, where that giant classroom is actually fine because a lot of your learning is done outside of class with, you know, AI tutor help. And then inside of class will be activities, exercises,…”
Mollick: AI tutors asking students if they understand are poorly designed
“Our rule of thumb is that if it asks you, if you understand a topic or you're ready to move on, it's a bad tutor because humans don't know when they're ready to move on or not.”
Mollick: Nuclear power plants will be built rapidly for AI compute
“And we're going to build a lot of nuclear power plants, I guess, and, you know, in relatively short order.”
Mollick: AI queries use 100x more energy than Google searches
“And the truth is that AI uses a lot more energy per query. We don't know exactly, probably two orders of magnitude than a Google search, but a lot less orders of magnitude energy than a human doing the same amount of work, right, with a laptop.”
Mollick: Public underestimates upcoming closed-source AI model releases
“I think people are probably over underestimating how much ammunition the Closed source labs have and are going to release in the near future.”
Mollick: Tech's biggest financial returns come from solving 'reverse salients'
“The money is all to be made in the reverse salient, right? So like if you can make a billion dollars as a data company and, but you know, because that's the area everyone's stuck on, you become a data company, right? This is, I mean, it's kind of capitalism an…”
Mollick: Steam engine progress stalled until James Watt's patents expired
“Things didn't really take off until Watts patents expired and it can be openly adapted”
Mollick: Lack of AI manuals leads to 'documentation by rumor'
“There is no manual out there for this stuff. There's not even a dissent, like there's not even a set of points about what the AI is good at and what it's bad at. And as a result, like it's, I would call it documentation by rumor.”
Mollick: AI advice boosts performance for already-successful Kenyan founders
“We know that people who get advice from AI do better as founders in Kenya, if they were already doing well”
Mollick: There are 16 managers for every software coder
“For every coder, there are 16 managers, right?”
Mollick: 1930s switchboard automation permanently displaced older operators
“When the telephone switchboards went from sort of manual to digital in the starting, or not digital at that point, but mechanical in the 19, starting in the 19 thirties, At that point, I think one out of every 16 women had spent time as a telephone operator. I…”
Mollick: Google used his wife's prompt as a fine-tuning benchmark
“Google used her prompt as the gold standard to measure their fine tuned models against.”
Mollick: Multimodal interaction is the primary consumer interface for AI
“I think multimodal is really the answer here.”
Mollick: Claude can design and iterate playable app prototypes in one prompt
“You could tell Claude come up with 30 ideas for a product to serve, you know, market X, then rate them all on quality and feasibility level. Then create, this is one prompt, by the way, then create a playable prototype of the interface for the application. The…”