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Post by Ethan Mollick on X

Ethan Mollick@emollick

I have no inside information, but every sign so far is that there is growing tension about open weights models between the US & China: the US announcing that they reserve the right to act against distilled models, then saying Kimi distills. Contradictory reports from China, etc.

330 likes35 repliesPosted Jul 22, 2026

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

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Based on absolute engagement — the platform doesn’t expose follower counts here, so large accounts score higher.

From likes, comments.

Why it worked

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.
Opens on a negative, which reads as a warning and is harder to ignore than a claim.

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

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For those confused why the US state and Silicon Valley are having a meltdown on twitter today. China released multiple AI models that are 50x more efficient than the best American AI models and made them open source, ruining the AI market

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

I am very excited about AI, but to go off-script for a minute: I built an app with Codex last week. It was very fun. Then I started asking it for ideas for new features and at least a couple of them were better than I was thinking of. I felt a little useless and it was sad.

Hi! I'm one of the prompt writers that worked on this ad. It's a lot harder than people think! Prompts that my team used include: -make it funny -make it epic AND funny -funnier!!! Please be nice to my team as many of them will be laid off/replaced by AI

It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy! Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.

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.

Ethan Mollick on AI · ViralLoop