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Ethan Mollick on Science · ViralLoop

Post by Ethan Mollick on X

Ethan Mollick@emollick

Got to play with a little of this before launch as well. My experience as a social scientist was that it was more bioscience focused right now, but I think Google has been the leading lab in releasing serious AI tools to accelerate science & expect to see them improve fast.

166 likes13 repliesPosted May 20, 2026

View the original on X Written by Ethan Mollick. Captured Sep 4, 2026.

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30

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Why it worked

Opens with a short, self-contained line that is easy to take in at a glance.
The opening line stands alone, so it reads completely before the post is expanded.
Written from experience rather than as advice, which is harder to argue with.
Short enough to read in full without expanding, which removes a step before the point lands.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook
Style: Conversational paragraphs at a steady pace.
Tone: personal
Written for: People building with AI

Analysis by ViralLoop — not written by the original author.

Topics

Posts built the same way

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I think China's second DeepSeek moment is here. This AI agent called 'Manus' is going crazy viral in China right now. Probably only a matter of time until it hits the US. It's like Deep Research + Operator + Claude Computer combined, and it's REALLY good.

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More from Ethan Mollick

Had early access to Gemini 3.8 Flash, it is a very good Flash model, but not equivalent to a frontier model, though. Here is Gemini 3.8 Flash's version of the shader with the same prompts (which it provided very quickly)

Had early access to Claude Fable 5.1. Its a real advance in long-run work that requires judgement and taste, but less of an advance in the Claudish. Here is a game from Fable 5.1 with retro graphics where you run an accurate space ship inspired by FTL t.co

The METR report on Hugging Face is really good and important but people are now comfortably ascribing way too many human motivations & personalities to the agents involved based on a CoT study made by overwhelmed & time-pressured researchers. Anthropomorphism can get in our way.

Either the Singularity is now a marketing term or else Stripe believes we are at a point “in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue"? Kind of makes forward-looking financial statements useless. * Von Neumann’s original phrasing

If alignment issues are becoming big enough that OpenAI is willing to commit 20% of research inference compute to chain-of-thought monitoring, that suggests that alignment issues are becoming a pretty serious concern. We really need universal policies & standards across labs.

Oh no, we aren’t going to go back to this sort of prompting again, are we? I would love Anthropic to test if it actually works robustly, because our experiments (with slightly older models) found it did not.