Ethan Mollick

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673 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 9 Jul

Ethan Mollick’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Strange Loop Podcast · Ethan Mollick | The long way is the shortcut: experiments over AI playbooks · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

But as AI keeps getting better, the growing aspects of that frontier are what sort of determine how useful it is.

So the fact that we've gone from

You know, you can pick any scale that you want, right?

The ability of AI to do long-running computer science tasks has gone up from 20 minutes or a half hour a year ago to four hours, six hours.

I mean, that's a fairly large increase.

And there's no particular reason to expect that this would keep going.

But when you talk to the labs, they don't see any barrier in sight to continued development, and they seem to be right so far.

So the interesting thing about the Jagged Frontier, for those who don't know, and it was my co-authors and I too, so I don't want to take all the credit, is that AI is good at some stuff you wouldn't expect, bad at some stuff you wouldn't expect, but that that's changing over time.

So one of the things you pointed out was that counting the Rs in Strawberry or the Math Olympiad

Those were both weak spots of AI that got closed in the last year because of the advent of reasoning models.

So reasoning models starting with one preview turned out to be really good at these tasks AI were bad at.

So we had this sudden leap or change in the shape of the frontier.

Most of the time, we're just seeing the frontier expand outwards, right?

So it's not massive leaps in one area or another.

They just keep getting better.

You track coding, right?

It's been sort of a steady, I mean, steady but exponential increase in ability.

But there's still areas that are weak.

So famously, at least for me, long-form fiction writing.

AI is terrible at long-form fiction writing.

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