Ethan Mollick: “For the past couple years, whenever you used a chatbot, it worked in a simple way: you typed something in, and it immediately started responding word by word (or more technically, token by token). The AI could only “think” while producing these tokens, so researchers developed tricks to improve its reasoning – like telling it to “think step by step before answering.” This approach, called chain-of-thought prompting, markedly improved AI performance. Reasoners essentially automate the process, producing “thinking tokens” before actually giving you an answer. This was a breakthrough in at least two important ways. First, because the AI companies could now get AIs to learn how to reason based on examples of really good problem-solvers, the AI can “think” more effectively. This training process can produce a higher quality chain-of-thought than we can by prompting. This means Reasoners are capable of solving much harder problems, especially in areas like math or logic where older chatbots failed. The second way this was a breakthrough is that it turns out that the longer Reasoners “think,” the better their answers get (though the rate of improvement slows as they think longer).”
L Rudolf L: “The key economic effect of AI is that it makes capital a more and more general substitute for labour. There’s less need to pay humans for their time to perform work, because you can replace that with capital (e.g. data centres running software replaces a human doing mental labour).”
Shane Parrish: “Persistence isn’t just pushing harder—it’s having energy that demands new ideas. Think of a founder solving a problem. Someone with just determination keeps trying the same approach. But a truly persistent founder has a restless energy that demands new solutions. When one approach fails, their energy compels them to imagine new ones. This cycle—energy demanding imagination, imagination feeding energy—is rare. Energy without imagination is force. Energy with imagination is persistence.”
Arnold Kling: “As Evans and Carr point out, the remixing of the intimate world and the remote world has made our social lives more brittle. Our insecurities have been magnified. Our fears and animosities have been strengthened. Going forward, I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world. If we look around, the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents. Once you notice that, you should adjust your aspirations accordingly.”
Andrew Chen: “In prior computing revolutions, from mainframe to desktop to GUI to web to mobile, all the new startups had the advantage that apps would have to be rewritten for the new UX. Incumbents were often caught flat-footed in the transition, and created poor next-gen apps if their expertise was a different platform (just think about Whatsapp vs AIM). This generation of AI is unusual though, in that it doesn’t come with a big reinvention of the UX. We still interact with all of these products as mobile apps, websites, and so on, rather than creating a completely new modality. Maybe incumbents that already control network effects and distribution will have an advantage, and people will rather interact with their LLMs via the Whatsapp search box rather than downloading a whole new app for it.”
