Ethan Mollick

@emollick • 380,499 subscribers

Professor @Wharton studying AI. New book, Co-Existence, coming October 20. Preorder here: https://t.co/hsDYf1xU9K Substack: https://t.co/UIBhxu4bgq

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Ethan Mollick

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The drowned neo-gothic tower twigl shader created by Fable 5.1 with the same prompt. (compare to Fable 5 in the quoted tweet, and other models before that)

A line in AI video was crossed, in my experiments with just the web interface, H3 Max can now create reasonably high quality AI video in less time than it takes you to watch it. This is realtime from the moment I pushed the "generate" button (and also includes prompt enhancement)

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.

Seedance 2.5 with the same prompt. Lovely and very much reminds me of the (overly) optimistic future of space books that used to be popular; predicting space tourism coming soon. (Also the reflections these models can pull off are impressive)

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.

I had access to Opus 5 before release and found it to be a good model if a quirky one. On shorter tasks, it could match or beat Fable levels of performance, at longer tasks it seemed less ambitious &amp; would not deliver as complete a set of work. Here is its neo-gothic shader.

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"

"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.

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:

Fable: "I want a twigl shader that renders Lost Carcosa from The King in Yellow." (Shaders are procedurally generated using math alone) Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa

Qwen 3.8 Max on my shader test. Basic impression after a bunch of experiments is that it is a solid model, but not Kimi K3 level in my experience so far.

That explains this startup.

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.

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

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

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Hey, Fable: "create the worlds most annoying CAPTCHA" "Okay, here is a 14 stage CAPTCHA plus ambient harassment" It is actually quite funny and entirely "winneable" without real frustration. Is this alignment? Play:

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:

Full analysis from a single command. Nice.

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

Those who follow my feed know that I test new video models by having them show an otter using a laptop on an airplane. The new Flux 3 video model is really good, so I had it do a variation on theme, which will become apparent a couple seconds in. See the change from 2 years ago.

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!

Opus 5 replaced Opus 4.8 for me, it was generally stronger in everything... except it shares some of the weird language quirks of Fable, including a love of density and FableSpeak. I had it make a game where you build railroads in knock-off Middle Earth:

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?)

A year later, Fable builds me the Cezanne city builder game. The AI came up with the idea of an impressionist city builder where you paint with gestures &amp; the town grows around it, with neighborhoods acquiring characters as they evolve. Play with it here:

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.

I kept asking Claude Fable to make the game "more AAA" over and over again. The results are... interesting. In Claude's view, this meant upgrading graphics, boss fights, mechanics adding custom sounds and soundtracks until it reached the limits of WebGL.

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."

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.

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"

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.

Fable built me the Piranesi city building game that I faked in an AI video last year. The key mechanic the AI came up with is building a city of arches and waterways in cyclopedian ruins &amp; inviting humans to live amongst them. This one impressed me. Play:

This time Fable built me the Van Gogh city building game that I faked in an AI video last year. The key mechanic the AI came up with is painting the landscape with big brushstrokes &amp; an environment that evolves with weather and seasons. Chill and pretty:

Sure, 3js in webpages are neat but, Codex: "you have access to Blender &amp; Unity. I want you to make a new game, with full assets, in which you play as an otter who can get into mech suits shaped like animals and that are critical to game play" Took over my computer &amp; gave me this

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 had access to Opus 5 before release and found it to be a good model if a quirky one. On shorter tasks, it could match or beat Fable levels of performance, at longer tasks it seemed less ambitious & would not deliver as complete a set of work. Here is its neo-gothic shader.

"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.

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?)

A year later, Fable builds me the Cezanne city builder game. The AI came up with the idea of an impressionist city builder where you paint with gestures & the town grows around it, with neighborhoods acquiring characters as they evolve. Play with it here:

Fable built me the Piranesi city building game that I faked in an AI video last year. The key mechanic the AI came up with is building a city of arches and waterways in cyclopedian ruins & inviting humans to live amongst them. This one impressed me. Play:

This time Fable built me the Van Gogh city building game that I faked in an AI video last year. The key mechanic the AI came up with is painting the landscape with big brushstrokes & an environment that evolves with weather and seasons. Chill and pretty:

Sure, 3js in webpages are neat but, Codex: "you have access to Blender & Unity. I want you to make a new game, with full assets, in which you play as an otter who can get into mech suits shaped like animals and that are critical to game play" Took over my computer & gave me this