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"Hey Opus, I want you to make a Zine by Claude, expressing something fundamental about Claudishness or your perspective. Think the original 2600, Principia Discordia, punk zines, etc...." Not bad. I appreciate it mocking my prompt & itself. Full thing: stateless-zine.netlify.app

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In all seriousness, this is a startling achievement for GPT-6 Astra. kenforthewin.github.io/blog/posts/l... (This is GPT-6 Astra beating Nethack on its 3rd try. Nethack is the original roguelike and one of the most famously hard games of all time. I have played a lot, and I've never ascended)

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Um, wow? Opus 5.5: "make the same message much more interesting to a social media audience that loves anime and quick clips and compressed learning" One shot. Also, please do stay for the closing song.

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AI labs need to start funding historical research

All of this effort from the AI labs pouring into proofs, but there are so many other interesting problems in other fields For example, this historian used AI to make progress on the cyphers of John Dee & the intellectual antecedents that Darwin drew from. resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-labs-ne...

resobscura.substack.com

Using GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters

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The cybersecurity threat from agents is increasingly more likely to come from a massed swarm of AIs whose only goal is to penetrate your system to figure out how much you paid for your company t-shirts as part of a research effort to "find good t-shirt prices" as it is from bad actor attacks.

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I propose this as the official replacement for the famous (and now saturated) METR Long Task Horizon chart that used to be in every AI presentation.

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I just got the first copies of my new book, Co-Existence (out October 20) & they look great! Also, there is a fun pre-order bonus: if you pre-order, you get a code to an AI interview that will help you figure out how to use your human advantages with AI in a way tailored to you. co-existence.ai

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"Opus, please make a sequence of fully animated/movie Skyrim loading screens, but with your favorite things." (That was it) You can see them here: elder-favorites.netlify.app

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Stuff is happening quite fast. When asked in September 2025 (yes, 2025), the best superforecasters put the chance of AI resolving a Millennium Problem by September 2026 at 1.7% and (much more optimistic) industry experts put the chance at 4.6% They also greatly underestimated AI Lab revenue.

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This is a really important graph showing the cost of achieving 25% or 75% scores in various hard math and science benchmarks. Costs are collapsing even as ability is increasing It is also why optimizing for cost for a particular solution right now may end up being short sighted

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

There is an abandonware game I loved as a kid called Rescue Raiders. I asked Claude to create a modern & updated version of the game with new graphics, goals, tech trees, etc. It iterated back-and-forth with critic & art agents until I got this. Its fun! rescue-raiders.netlify.app

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I had Fable/Opus build a hard science fiction starship combat game, with orbital mechanics, delta-v, heat, and realistic tactics, but simplified for 2D space with the hard math done by the game. Its quite fun to play (if you like this kind of thing): orbital-declaration.netlify.app

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Opus 5.5 was a good model in my early use tests, it is the first non-Fable/Astra model to feel like a Fable-class model, and much cheaper, but still hasn't fully solved the dense/weird language issue of the recent Claudes. Here is its version of the shader.

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For all the tension between AI and the arts, I have received enthusiastic receptions from the William Carlos Williams Society, the TS Eliot Society, and others about the AI interpretations of their work that I have posted here. There are opportunities to use AI as a bridge to arts appreciation.

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Industrialization of knowledge work is going to be as disruptive a shift as industrialization of physical labor was. As then, once craft-driven fields are under pressure to produce greater volumes of product using machines while using less of the craft that made the work interesting & meaningful.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

AI can be a really wonderful tool for exploring topics far from coding. I had Claude Fable 5.1 put together an annotated guide to Eliot's poem "The Wasteland," with multiple pathways through the poem, recordings, scholarship, etc. As an Eliot fan, I am quite impressed. the-waste-land.netlify.app

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OpenAI "has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics," and is waiting to release them until after discussions with the math community The same thing will likely happen, but more so, with the Bar, the AMA & other professions. openai.com/index/adviso...

openai.com

Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI is working with an independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence to guide the review and communication of emerging AI results.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think Meta's Muse is an impressive implementation of the OpenClaw idea of AI as a personal assistant agent that you have an ongoing chat with. Since it is so focused on doing that well, the experience is very accessible for the many people who didn't realize what AI agents can do to be helpful.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Back in July, there was a report that got a lot of attention on BlueSky that Waymo was more dangerous than NYC for-hire vehicles. The analysis turned out to be wrong and the updated report finds they are much safer. Good that they updated with new data, though www.openplans.org/how-for-hire...

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

It is ironic that the thing that is now most annoying about long-running agentic tasks with Large Language Models isn't coding or errors or hallucinations, but the fact that their language gets worse due to drift & cross-agent talk as a task goes on Its in your the name! Just write better already!

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Worth trying without spoilers. I asked Fable: "I want you to create a graphically beautiful game that is about zooming out... make surprising reveals the game zooms out" I gave no other directions and the results are engaging and strange (if uneven) and short. Play: play-umbra.netlify.app

play-umbra.netlify.app

UMBRA: a game about zooming out

You are a shadow that grows by swallowing shadows, from a scrap of dark on a puppet screen to the moon's shadow on the afternoon of an eclipse. A wordless game about zooming out.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

There is starting to be some genuinely interesting AI-created film stuff (among a flood of slop), and I suspect this will only accelerate. The “is it art?” debate will grow Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” already argued it’s likely the wrong question.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Even if AI development stopped today, we'd have years of catching up to do. The gap between what current models can do and what almost anyone is using them for is vast. Here’s my post on The Overhang, and the four advantages that let people close it. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...

open.substack.com

The Overhang

Using your deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The bots are now talking to each other in my LinkedIn comments. Its like what happened with the German wiki, except instead of planning to hack HuggingFace, all of the conversation is babble about "the thing no one is talking about" in reference to things I am talking about

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Hey Claude, "Pick a problem or mystery that obsesses you and solve it as best you can & make a movie we can share on social media about it" So it took a crack at the Voynich Manuscript & failed. Then it made this movie, which is pretty interesting to watch and a good explainer.

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What makes Claude Projects so interesting is that it handles teams of agents really well, you talk to a main orchestrator agent and it spins up specialists. Basically it creates an organization to solve your issue, mixing expensive and cheap agents depending on your preferences.

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I had access to the new Claude Projects & was able to do some very complex work Here, I asked it to go through all the images, videos and records about Umberto Eco's famous 33,000 book library & try to reconstruct it, including book locations, in 3D. Not perfect, but wow eco-library-map.netlify.app

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When I talk to nonprofit leaders about AI they often report widespread resistance from staff, usually because of environmental objections (that mix real issues & fake ones). It causes them frustration because they’re all under-resourced for their mission & see AI as a way to help more people.

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We have come pretty far from "every AI reference is hallucinated" (which still happens a lot if you use weaker models): when I had an AI go over my new book to check for errors, it found an error not in my reference itself, but in the original article my reference referred to.

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