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 34 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
Mollick: Wharton Generative AI Lab will open-source an AI tutoring system
“And by the way, we've actually built a version of this already at the General of AI Lab at Wharton. We'll be open sourcing all of that, like, that does this kind of stuff.”
Mollick: Homework effectiveness fell from 80% to 20% due to cheating
“There's this great study at a repeating university that found that homework It improved, when you did the homework, it improved something like 80% of people's test scores in 2008. And by 2020, it only helped 20% of people. And that's not because homework stopp…”
Mollick: Selling 6,000 hardcover copies weekly yields NYT Bestseller status
“If you're, like, you're selling, like, 6000 hardcover copies in a week. Like, that's getting on the New York Times bestseller list.”
Mollick: Major AI companies will inevitably enter custom chipmaking
“Yeah, I mean, the, your requirement in any supply chain pipeline is to eat the value. If you're, you know, like, that's the whole idea of, you know, how those things work. So, like, if the, if you're spending a lot of money on chips, you go into chip making. J…”