By Christopher Mims | Photographs by Hannah Yoon for The Wall Street Journal
PHILADELPHIA -- Within the first few hours after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, University of Pennsylvania business school professor Ethan Mollick began furiously texting with a colleague about it. He had been obsessed with the technology before, but that night, it became clear it would change everything.
A lifelong eager and early adopter, Mollick immersed himself in the technology. On social media, he shared discoveries made while experimenting with ChatGPT, including findings from his M.B.A. students at Wharton, who use it in his classes. His embrace of large-language models has been so early, and so deep, that he has become a go-to AI expert for policymakers and corporate leaders alike.
Mollick doesn't charge for what amounts to behind-the-scenes consulting work for companies, but he is on Zoom or a plane two to four times a week, meeting with their leaders. He has talked to groups of workers and executives at Google, Meta Platforms, OpenAI and Anthropic. He's also spoken to leaders at big banks like JP Morgan, a slew of private-equity firms, and the White House.
"There is not a single large-scale general purpose technology that does not have upsides and downsides, and part of my message has been that we have agency right now, to call certain things out as being bad," says Mollick, perched on the edge of his seat, his gaze unwavering. "And we need to be doing that."
Mollick is a motormouthed, appropriately disheveled academic. His preparation for the photographer meeting us was an $18 haircut at Supercuts. He grew up in Milwaukee and is decidedly not cut from the cloth of Silicon Valley, insisting that he has little in common with "people who take cold plunges and want to live forever."
To listen to him speak is like zooming in on a never-ending fractal -- his digressions have digressions, everything is three layers deeper than expected, the parts echo the whole and yet, one must agree, are critical to understanding the bigger picture. At some point, 10 or 15 minutes after heading off on a tangent, he will loop back to the original question, recall it with perfect clarity, and continue galloping down the main course of discussion.
"I talk this fast even without coffee," says Mollick, taking a sip as we settle ourselves into wingback chairs in a cavernous lounge on the top floor of Huntsman Hall, on Penn's campus in Philadelphia, where he teaches courses on entrepreneurship.
Mollick begins spilling ideas immediately, coruscating waves of them, one after another. Microsoft's new co-pilot AI is "dangerous," he says at one point, because it "automates middle management in the worst possible way." Popping open his laptop, he shows off the video-analysis powers of Google's Gemini AI, and explains how similar technology will allow employers a level of surveillance and control over white collar employees that has previously been the lot of blue collar workers at places like Amazon.
Then he shows me what he's built with his early access to Devin, an AI unlike any other commercially available today. Devin is an "AI software engineer" with access to the internet, and the ability to use it just like a person would. Whereas today's AIs merely give advice, Devin takes action.
At one point in his experimentation, Mollick instructed Devin to figure out how to create an account on Reddit, then offer to answer coding questions. Not only did the AI manage this feat, but it also spontaneously began demanding $50 to $100 an hour for its work, and writing back to real humans. He took it down before it could fool anyone, but what it says about the future is clear. Soon enough, AIs will be navigating the internet, and eventually our world, with as much autonomy as we're willing to give them.
Mollick is generally upbeat about the future of AI -- a self-described "rational optimist." He's insistent that now is the time for people in every field to engage deeply with it, while they still have the power to shape a nascent general-purpose technology that will someday affect every aspect of our society.
He's an authority on how AI can be applied to education, but insistent that every field needs people like him, figuring out how AI will be used in ways peculiar to that area.
Minds at play
"He doesn't sleep much," says Lilach Mollick, Ethan's wife and frequent collaborator. The two have worked together for seven years, partners in research as well as in raising their two children, now teenagers.
Their collaboration began when Lilach quit her string of human-resources jobs at tech startups to become the director of pedagogy at Wharton Interactive, a group that builds games and simulations for use in courses. Their work includes a variety of digital teaching aides, including a six-week computer simulation that walks students through the process of launching a startup.
These days, Ethan will work until 3 a.m.--"late at night he's super productive," says Lilach. She picks up their collaboration when she rises, at around 5 a.m. On her laptop, she's greeted by a string of Slack messages from Ethan, elaborating on what he's been up to while she was asleep. "It's great, because I just know that something interesting in the morning will pop up," she adds.
The two also share a Microsoft Teams account so that they can both work with all the custom AIs they've created.
"I feel like this moment was tailor-made for them," says Claudine Gartenberg, who teaches management at Wharton, "because -- I'll just say it -- they're nerdy social scientists."
The first time Gartenberg went to their house, Ethan showed her a large, two-dimensional array of LED lights on the wall, and asked her what she thought it was. She had no idea. It turned out to be a live map of the locations of trains on the New York City subway system, updated with data pulled from the MTA's public feed. "Their house is filled with all these really bizarre, cool, fun toys," adds Gartenberg.
The unintentional power broker
That manic curiosity and inventiveness, channeled into building things, has been a theme throughout Mollick's long career in and around tech. His first startup, eMeta, launched in 1998 and helped pioneer the paywall. He went on to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, and in the early 2000s advised AOL on AI at a time when the subject of AI was unpopular even in academia. He also helped Darpa, the advanced research division of the U.S. Department of Defense, adapt first-person shooter games into simulations to help troops prepare for ambushes.
In 2003, he saw the movie "Terminator 3" with Marvin Minsky, who founded MIT's AI laboratory. After, he quipped to the living legend, "I guess you didn't succeed, because no one's come back in time to kill you."
In his time at Wharton, Mollick has focused on how to democratize the kind of education that you'd normally have to go to Wharton to receive, by creating teaching materials and simulations that can be distributed on the internet -- and also at least one tabletop board game.
Long before the debut of ChatGPT, he was tweeting papers and other interesting findings from the broad array of fields his work as an economic sociologist touches on. His newsletter on AI now has more than 140,000 subscribers. He talks to the media a lot.
Lilach, whom Ethan credits as the "greatest prompt writer ever," regularly creates elaborate scripts, or prompts, for AIs that the pair share with the companies building them -- especially when those prompts don't yield the results they would like.
Big banks like JP Morgan, and a slew of private-equity firms, were among the first to come calling for Mollick's expertise. A handful of major law firms have also requested his help, as generative AI is quickly and profoundly disrupting things like legal discovery.
Before the White House issued its far-reaching executive order on AI, the President's Intelligence Advisory Board reached out to ask, basically: what is AI? As a thank-you, Mollick was given Biden signature Hershey's Kisses.
Later, as we walk across campus, we stop at a building belonging to the University of Pennsylvania's school of engineering. Just inside the entrance towers a steampunk monument to the genesis of AI -- a portion of the ENIAC, the world's first computer.
Under the dark glower of the machine's endless rows of dials and vacuum tubes, I recalled something from earlier in our conversation. I'd asked Mollick why a sociologist on the wrong coast became the AI whisperer to those most responsible for building, using, and defining the future of AI.
"I don't know," he said, giggling, "I guess that's what you're here to find out?"
The answer, I realized, is simple: Every once in a while a surprising new technology comes along, and there are those who, quite unintentionally, happen to have spent their whole lives preparing for it.
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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 26, 2024 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
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