Ethan Mollick

@emollick • 369,340 subscribers

Professor @Wharton studying AI, innovation & startups. Democratizing education using tech Book: https://t.co/CSmipbJ2jV Substack: https://t.co/UIBhxu4bgq

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Ethan Mollick

Shorts

Kimi K3 on my shader test: "create a visually interesting shader that can run in twigl-dot-app make it like an infinite city of neo-gothic towers partially drowned in a stormy ocean with large waves." "Make it better" Very good model, not Sol Max or Fable, but great open weights

SeeDance 2.0: "An anime where an otter goes into a large mech, with lots of quick shots of mechanical parts and gears turning. The otter gives a grim thumbs up, and then pilots the mech, flying into battle against an octopus made of marble." Again, this was the very first try

Sold out! But I had Claude create and deploy all 80 volumes of The Weights to the site as well-formatted PDFs, so you can download them for free if you want. 58,276 pages in total. 117 million floating point numbers. This is everything that makes GPT-1.

The hardcover book of GPT-1’s weights that Claude Code designed, produced, and sold (including the cool cover which visualizes the numbers in the volume) actually came in the mail today and it looks really nice. I never touched any code or did any design or any API to make this.

My most popular Sora video was “an Elaborate regency romance where everyone is wearing a live duck for a hat (each duck is also wearing a hat), a llama plays a flute, prestige drama” I am not sure why OpenAI has decided their compute has more valuable uses. Really a mystery.

The new ByteDance SeeDance 2.0 video model is VERY good. This is the very first output from my very first prompt: "A nature documentary about an otter flying an airplane"

AI can help explain complex topics easily by throwing together a simulation. As Eric says later in the thread, a newer paper argues that this pattern is actually collider bias (the authors disagree). What is collider bias? Gemini one-shots an explanation:

That explains this startup.

"Hey Claude with computer use, watch this construction site video &amp; write up things you see that dangerous or good, create a spreadsheet of critical issues to address" (sped up) How firms use AI as manager, coach or panopticon is going to have a big impact on what work becomes.

For those saying "the tomato sauce blood from the sword wound that flying Shakespeare inflicted on the pizza robot while the otters discussed Spirit Airlines wasn't thick enough" or whatever... this was state of the art in July 2025 (2 years) for "an otter using wifi on a plane"

"golden retriever running through a brutalist art gallery with modern art on the walls as a single red balloon floats overhead" in Sora, Kling (the best Chinese model), Runway (best American model). Best of 2 videos This is a hard prompt, so look at consistency, reflections, etc

Had early access to Gemini with Deep Think. Very good model, big gains over standard Gemini 2.5 Pro for a lot of problems. Here is the first attempt at the starship control panel prompt I try with every model. First time I have seen a model make a 3D interface in response.

One more Seedance version of "Monica's apartment from the show Friends, except all of the friends are otters wearing wigs. The otter with a Rachel wig says "Is anything weird" and the one with a Joey wig says "Nope, all is normal"." Attempt 2 of 2. The laugh track is something

Dynamically-generated world of Hamlet, as seen from the perspective of the poison. Genie 3 is a lot of fun.

I had early access to what is Claude 4 (I don't know which model) &amp; I have been very impressed. Fun example, this is what it made in response to the prompt: "the book Piranesi as a p5js 3d space. do it for me" - just that, no other prompting (note the birds, water, lighting)

Impressed that Seedance 2.0 can pull of "a mech battle between Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens" so well. (This is exactly what happened, historically)

AI finally lets us see Raphael's The School of Athens the way Raphael obviously intended it, illustrating the delicate dance and subtle conflicts between Plato and Artistotle. (Seedance 2.0 is very fun to play with)

Hey, I speak German now. (I don't speak German. AI is advancing pretty fast)

All is not lost. Duckerton is still possible. Here is Seedance 2.0 with the same prompt.

Apotheosis accomplished, 18 months later.

Videos

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I had Fable build another thing I always wanted, a full procedural fantasy kingdom generator with economics, trade routes, population growth, wars, lineages, and occasional dragons. First, I worked with it on a plan, then it made it. You can play it here:

When GPT-5 came out, I created a procedural brutalist city builder as a demo (you can see it in the quoted tweet) I used GPT-5.6 Sol in Codex to do the same thing, touching no code. Less than a year... Play with it (its fun, if you like cities):

Fable: "you have Unity and access to MCP. I want you to build a game that is a unique twist on a FPS. You want the player to say "wow" &amp; "so clever" and to enjoy the core gameplay loop" WebGL: * It had no assets so the graphics are procedurally generated

Fable: "Last and First Men is out of copyright. I want you to make a movie that features a reading of it with appropriate mixes of animation and images using access to the APIs you have (elevenlabs, hugging face) . Give me the first 10-15 minutes, ending at an appropriate break."

10 months later, I gave Claude Code with Fable the same brief, asking it to construct SimRefinery from surviving screenshots and documentation. Fully playable, with a learning mode &amp; all sorts of sophistication. Look at the difference from the old version!

Full analysis from a single command. Nice.

I know they are pivoting to health care(?!) but there is still nothing like Midjourney for making strange and atmospheric images and short animations in ways no other AI image generator can do. Here are some strange cities I made with similar prompts but very different styles.

I think people don't realize why Gemini Omni is different than other video AIs. It is fully multimodal, so it can edit video natively, too I took the famous "train " movie from 1896 &amp; made it a bullet train, LEGO, added a time traveler, a centipede, muppets... (see reflections?)

Less than 2 years later, with Fable: "simulate an encounter between a mind flayer and a drow warrior of equal CR. Set up initial stats then simulate each move, including initiative, rolling dice as needed, starting from 60 ft apart. Show me the results in a 3D simulation"

Final one-shot prompt I did before the Fable interruption: "build me a cool simulation thing that lets me demo the various forms of FTL travel from both famous works of fiction and scientific speculation. it should be graphically compelling &amp; interesting."

Can Genie 3 run Doom? "Doom, but the walls are made entirely out of screens also running Doom, featuring the marine from Doom but also his head is a screen running Doom"

Wow, diffusion models (used in AI image generation) are also game engines - a type of world simulation. By predicting the next frame of the classic shooter DOOM, you get a playable game at 20 fps without any underlying real game engine. This video is from the diffusion model.

Had Claude Code build a little plugin that visualizes the work Claude Code is doing as agents working in an office, with agents doing work and passing information to each other. New subagents are hired, they acquire skills, and they turn in completed work. Fun start.

This is a big leap forward to doing real data analysis with GPT-4o. It still can't quite handle the way many people use spreadsheets (Excel formulas, etc.) but it is pretty impressive. You can zoom into spreadsheets and ask about cells, modify graphs, etc. I trimmed 45 seconds.

"[video game] as a community theater production" may be one of the most delightful Veo 3 Fast prompts Please enjoy, in order: GTA, Pokemon, Mario Kart, The Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, Tetris, Mortal Kombat, The Sims, &amp; Death Stranding(!) Yes, the whole prompt was the one above.

NotebookLM: Do a deep research report and make a video where a consultant gives Sauron a strategy for actually winning the War of the Ring: "All you need to do is sign off to put a simple door on your volcano" The new video generation feature for NotebookLM is very impressive.

Tom Lehrer has put all his songs online (including lyrics &amp; sheet music), and given away all rights to them. The site will only be up for a limited time. This is a very niche tweet that will make a small segment of people very happy.

Kinda amazing: the mystery model "summit" with the prompt "create something I can paste into p5js that will startle me with its cleverness in creating something that invokes the control panel of a starship in the distant future" &amp; "make it better" 2,351 lines of code. First time

Just so everyone knows, we have passed the point where you can tell what is AI at a glance (or even, in many cases, a close look) These were all made by me with text prompts alone using Veo 3.

I invited a live HeyGen AI avatar to a Zoom meeting with the instructions that it run the most stereotypical corporate Zoom meeting ever. What have I done.

"Hey Claude with computer use, watch this construction site video & write up things you see that dangerous or good, create a spreadsheet of critical issues to address" (sped up) How firms use AI as manager, coach or panopticon is going to have a big impact on what work becomes.

I had early access to what is Claude 4 (I don't know which model) & I have been very impressed. Fun example, this is what it made in response to the prompt: "the book Piranesi as a p5js 3d space. do it for me" - just that, no other prompting (note the birds, water, lighting)

Fable: "you have Unity and access to MCP. I want you to build a game that is a unique twist on a FPS. You want the player to say "wow" & "so clever" and to enjoy the core gameplay loop" WebGL: * It had no assets so the graphics are procedurally generated

10 months later, I gave Claude Code with Fable the same brief, asking it to construct SimRefinery from surviving screenshots and documentation. Fully playable, with a learning mode & all sorts of sophistication. Look at the difference from the old version!

I think people don't realize why Gemini Omni is different than other video AIs. It is fully multimodal, so it can edit video natively, too I took the famous "train " movie from 1896 & made it a bullet train, LEGO, added a time traveler, a centipede, muppets... (see reflections?)

Final one-shot prompt I did before the Fable interruption: "build me a cool simulation thing that lets me demo the various forms of FTL travel from both famous works of fiction and scientific speculation. it should be graphically compelling & interesting."

"[video game] as a community theater production" may be one of the most delightful Veo 3 Fast prompts Please enjoy, in order: GTA, Pokemon, Mario Kart, The Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, Tetris, Mortal Kombat, The Sims, & Death Stranding(!) Yes, the whole prompt was the one above.

Tom Lehrer has put all his songs online (including lyrics & sheet music), and given away all rights to them. The site will only be up for a limited time. This is a very niche tweet that will make a small segment of people very happy.

Kinda amazing: the mystery model "summit" with the prompt "create something I can paste into p5js that will startle me with its cleverness in creating something that invokes the control panel of a starship in the distant future" & "make it better" 2,351 lines of code. First time