So the two most obvious barriers to some sort of true AI takeoff are robust RSI (AI acting as an independent AI researcher, rather than “merely” a multiplier of human effort) and continual learning. Either would represent a major change in trajectory for AI development.
@emollick
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Experiments Used GPT-4 and GPT-4o; Newer Models Could Improve Results
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And, yes, our experiments used a mix of GPT-4 & GPT-4o (publishing takes awhile). I think we would see much larger results with more recent models, let alone recent agentic tools.
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GPT-5.5 Pro applies research technique to generate funny word pairs
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GPT-5.5 Pro faces its hardest academic challenge: to apply the technique from a paper analyzing which word pairs were funny & why to come up with its own It came up with scrotum snorkel, tuba subpoena, waffle coffin, toad commode, diarrhea tiara, banana tribunal & muffin ruffian
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Use AI to Build Interactive Retirement Scenario Simulators
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One use case that is interesting is to ask it to build an interactive scenario simulator, with appropriate visualizations, so that you can explore different retirement outcomes, etc. depending on how your financial situation changes.
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Use system prompts to make AI interview users for personal finance advice
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Personal financial decisions are full of assumptions, & the AI, as smart as it is, makes some of these without enough context. In addition to the skills, a system prompt that drives the AI to interview you to ensure that it understands your personal situation would be helpful too
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ChatGPT for personal finance needs built‑in skills
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ChatGPT for personal finance is interesting, but you need to know what questions to ask and have enough experience to fact-check assumptions. It really needs to ship with some pre-built skills to help guide people to productive use cases & give the AI better instructions as well
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AI, politics, and assumptions about powerful systems
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The talk about AI & politics seems to be oddly missing a segment (a) assumes extremely capable AI is possible soon and (b) has a strong belief about how to use this technology to make human life better according to the political project they believe in. It is a moment of action.
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Codex generalizes problems, limiting non-coding work unnecessarily
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Another aspect of this is that Codex, like a good programmer, wants to generalize problems. It has a tendency to write a repeatable code base that generates the required output. But for a lot of non-coding work, this is unnecessary and often limiting, since it anchors the work.
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Runway’s Agent mode builds complex stories from short text
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Fine, you all want to code like this I guess.
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) 15 mai 2026
(Runway's new Agent mode is quite impressive, doing fairly complex story building from just a short text description of what you want. Not error free obviously, but this was pretty great for a one-shot attempt) https://t.co/vPNUwJI0gA pic.twitter.com/dO8lwbpgjKFine, you all want to code like this I guess. (Runway's new Agent mode is quite impressive, doing fairly complex story building from just a short text description of what you want. Not error free obviously, but this was pretty great for a one-shot attempt)
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Codex critiques developer-focused interface and bias against non-coders.
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Codex is very good, but it is still a very "developer coded" interface for an everything app. And it continues the somewhat annoying AI perspective that non-coders are just not as competent and need stuff hidden from them, as opposed to requiring a different form of complexity.