Ethan Mollick > Quotes

“You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you—or threaten you and your job.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“As artificial intelligence proliferates, users who intimately understand the nuances, limitations, and abilities of AI tools are uniquely positioned to unlock AI’s full innovative potential. These user innovators are often the source of breakthrough ideas for new products and services.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“The culture that a founder creates is one of the most durable aspects of the company, outlasting the founder itself and carrying on the tradition of the firm.”
― Ethan Mollick, The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors

“We have invented technologies, from axes to helicopters, that boost our physical capabilities; and others, like spreadsheets, that automate complex tasks; but we have never built a generally applicable technology that can boost our intelligence.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“This book may seem as if it is full of science fiction, but everything I am describing has already happened. We have created a weird alien mind, one that isn’t sentient but can fake it remarkably well. It is trained on the vast archives of human knowledge, and also on the backs of low-paid workers. It can pass tests and act creatively, with the potential to change how we work and learn; but it also makes up information regularly. You can no longer trust that anything you see, or hear, or read was not created by AI. All of that already happened. Humans, walking and talking bags of water and trace chemicals that we are, have managed to convince well-organized sand to pretend to think like us.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“And you can’t figure out why an AI is generating a hallucination by asking it. It is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the AI will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result. The system has no way of explaining its decisions, or even knowing what those decisions were. Instead, it is (you guessed it) merely generating text that it thinks will make you happy in response to your query. LLMs are not generally optimized to say “I don’t know” when they don’t have enough information. Instead, they will give you an answer, expressing confidence.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“At the core of the most extreme dangers from AI is the stark fact that there is no particular reason that AI should share our view of ethics and morality.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“One small study of undergraduates found that 66 percent of men and 25 percent of women choose to painfully shock themselves rather than sit quietly with nothing to do for 15 minutes. Boredom doesn’t just lead us to hurt ourselves; 18 percent of bored people killed worms when given a chance (only 2 percent of non-bored people did). Bored parents and soldiers both act more sadistically. Boredom is not just boring; it is dangerous in its own way.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“This tends to make us uncomfortable: After all, how can AI, a machine, generate something new and creative? The issue is that we often mistake novelty for originality. New ideas do not come from the ether; they are based on existing concepts. Innovation scholars have long pointed to the importance of recombination in generating ideas. Breakthroughs often happen when people connect distant, seemingly unrelated ideas. To take a canonical example, the Wright brothers combined their experience as bicycle mechanics and their observations of the flight of birds to develop their concept of a controllable plane that could be balanced and steered by warping its wings.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“Remarkably, with a vast number of adjustable parameters (called weights), LLMs can create a model that emulates how humans communicate through written text. Weights are complex mathematical transformations that LLMs learn from reading those billions of words, and they tell the AI how likely different words or parts of words are to appear together or in a certain order. The original ChatGPT had 175 billion weights, encoding the connection between words and parts of words. No one programmed these weights; instead, they are learned by the AI itself during its training.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“The most common approach to reducing bias is for humans to correct the AIs, as in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) process, which is part of the fine-tuning of LLMs that we discussed in the previous chapter.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“LLMs are connection machines. They are trained by generating relationships between tokens that may seem unrelated to humans but represent some deeper meaning. Add in the randomness that comes with AI output, and you have a powerful tool for innovation. The AI seeks to generate the next word in a sequence by finding the next likely token, no matter how weird the previous words were. So it should be no surprise that the AI can come up with novel concepts with ease. I asked AI to: Find me business ideas that would incorporate fast food, patent 6,604,835 B2 [which turned out to be for a lava lamp that included bits of crystal], and 14th century England.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“In fact, the best evidence we have about testing ideas shows that founders who use a disciplined, scientific process are more likely to succeed.”
― Ethan Mollick, The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors

“In most cases, startups that try to enter a hot market have lower performance than those that avoid chasing the latest trend.25”
― Ethan Mollick, The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors

“In the short term, then, we might expect to see little change in employment (but many changes in tasks), but, as Amara’s Law, named after futurist Roy Amara, says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“An AI future requires that we lean into building our own expertise as human experts. Since expertise requires facts, students will still need to learn reading, writing, history, and all the other basic skills required in the twenty-first century. We have already seen how this broad-based knowledge can help people get the most out of AI. And besides, we need to continue to have educated citizens rather than delegate all our thinking to machines.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“that severely curtailed their usefulness. The Transformer solved these issues by utilizing an “attention mechanism.” This technique allows the AI to concentrate on the most relevant parts of a text, making it easier for the AI to understand and work with language in a way that seemed more human.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“Raj, conversely, integrates an AI-driven architectural design assistant into his workflow. Each time he creates a design, the AI provides instantaneous feedback. It can highlight structural inefficiencies, suggest improvements based on sustainable materials, and even predict potential costs. Moreover, the AI offers comparisons between Raj’s designs and a vast database of other innovative architectural works, highlighting differences and suggesting areas of improvement. Instead of just iterating designs, Raj engages in a structured reflection after every project, thanks to the insights from the AI. It’s akin to having a mentor watching over his shoulder at every step, nudging him toward excellence.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“An MIT study found that Twitter users who followed diverse groups of people were better at generating ideas than those with closed networks.”
― Ethan Mollick, The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors

“Start with the resources you have today and leap into starting your business based on what you can do better than anyone else. Don’t wait for the objectively perfect idea; embrace the idea that only you can implement right now.”
― Ethan Mollick, The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors

“With lower-cost workers doing the same work in less time, mass unemployment, or at least underemployment, becomes more likely, and we may see the need for policy solutions, like a four-day workweek or universal basic income, that reduce the floor for human welfare.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“Ultimately, that is all ChatGPT does technically—act as a very elaborate autocomplete like you have on your phone.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“Our new AIs have been trained on a huge amount of our cultural history and are using it to provide us with text and images in response to our queries. But there is no index or map to what they know and where they might be most helpful. Thus, we need people who have deep or broad knowledge of unusual fields to use AI in ways that others cannot, developing unexpected and valuable prompts and testing the limits of how they work. AI could catalyze interest in the humanities as a sought-after field of study, since the knowledge of the humanities makes AI users uniquely qualified to work with the AI.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“AI is what those of us who study technology call a General Purpose Technology (ironically, also abbreviated GPT). These advances are once-in-a-generation technologies, like steam power or the internet, that touch every industry and every aspect of life. And, in some ways, generative AI might even be bigger.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“a judge, the AI generates a picture of a man 97 percent of the time, even though 34 percent of US judges are women. In showing fast-food workers, 70 percent had darker skin tones, even though 70 percent of American fast-food workers are white.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“In study after study, the people who get the biggest boost from AI are those with the lowest initial ability—it turns poor performers into good performers. In writing tasks, bad writers become solid. In creativity tests, it boosts the least creative the most. And among law students, the worst legal writers turn into good ones. And in a study of early generative AI at a call center, the lowest-performing workers became 35 percent more productive, while experienced workers gained very little.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“the most innovative people benefit the least7 from AI creative help.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“But in many ways, hallucinations are a deep part of how LLMs work. They don’t store text directly; rather, they store patterns about which tokens are more likely to follow others. That means the AI doesn’t actually “know” anything. It makes up its answers on the fly. Plus, if it sticks too closely to the patterns in its training data, the model is said to be overfitted to that training data. Overfitted LLMs may fail to generalize to new or unseen inputs and generate irrelevant or inconsistent text—in short, their results are always similar and uninspired. To avoid this, most AIs add extra randomness in their answers, which correspondingly raises the likelihood of hallucination.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“We count on most terrorists and criminals to be relatively dumb, but AI may prove to boost their capabilities in dangerous ways.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI

“Imagine your AI collaborator as an infinitely fast intern, eager to please but prone to bending the truth.”
― Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI