The Curious Engineer

All blogs / AI / ML

One Useful Thing

oneusefulthing.org

Trying to understand the implications of AI for work, education, and life. By Prof. Ethan Mollick. Click to read One Useful Thing, by Ethan Mollick, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

AI / ML

’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
141 from 10 Nov 2022 to 20 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (18 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/feed

2026 15

  1. 30 Months on the Exponential (in Charts)
  2. The Dot and the Swarm
  3. The Overhang
  4. Agency and Agents
  5. An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff
  6. The twilight of the chatbots
  7. What it feels like to work with Mythos
  8. Co-Existence and the End of Co-Intelligence
  9. Choosing to Stay Human
  10. Sign of the future: GPT-5.5
  11. Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces
  12. The Shape of the Thing
  13. A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era
  14. Management as AI superpower
  15. Claude Code and What Comes Next

2025 22

  1. The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients
  2. Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3
  3. Giving your AI a Job Interview
  4. An Opinionated Guide to Using AI Right Now
  5. Real AI Agents and Real Work
  6. On Working with Wizards
  7. Mass Intelligence
  8. GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff
  9. The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can
  10. Against "Brain Damage"
  11. Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guide
  12. The recent history of AI in 32 otters
  13. Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd
  14. Personality and Persuasion
  15. On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after
  16. No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation
  17. The Cybernetic Teammate
  18. Speaking things into existence
  19. A new generation of AIs: Claude 3.7 and Grok 3
  20. The End of Search, The Beginning of Research
  21. Which AI to Use Now: An Updated Opinionated Guide (Updated Again 2/15)
  22. Prophecies of the Flood

2024 31

  1. What just happened
  2. 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to
  3. Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting
  4. The Present Future: AI's Impact Long Before Superintelligence
  5. When you give a Claude a mouse
  6. Thinking Like an AI
  7. Scaling: The State of Play in AI
  8. Something New: On OpenAI's "Strawberry" and Reasoning
  9. Post-apocalyptic education
  10. Change blindness
  11. On speaking to AI
  12. Confronting Impossible Futures
  13. Gradually, then Suddenly: Upon the Threshold
  14. Latent Expertise: Everyone is in R&D
  15. What Apple's AI Tells Us: Experimental Models⁴
  16. Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition
  17. Four Singularities for Research
  18. What OpenAI did
  19. Superhuman?
  20. Freeing the chatbot
  21. Innovation through prompting
  22. What just happened, what is happening next
  23. On the necessity of a sin
  24. Which AI should I use? Superpowers and the State of Play
  25. I, Cyborg: Using Co-Intelligence
  26. Captain's log: the irreducible weirdness of prompting AIs
  27. Strategies for an Accelerating Future
  28. Google's Gemini Advanced: Tasting Notes and Implications
  29. What Can be Done in 59 Seconds: An Opportunity (and a Crisis)
  30. The Lazy Tyranny of the Wait Calculation
  31. Signs and Portents

2023 57

  1. An AI Haunted World
  2. An Opinionated Guide to Which AI to Use: ChatGPT Anniversary Edition
  3. Reshaping the tree: rebuilding organizations for AI
  4. Not much is changing, a lot is changing
  5. Almost an Agent: What GPTs can do
  6. Working with AI: Two paths to prompting
  7. The Best Available Human Standard
  8. What people ask me most. Also, some answers.
  9. The shape of the shadow of The Thing
  10. Everyone is above average
  11. Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier
  12. Embracing weirdness: What it means to use AI as a (writing) tool
  13. Now is the time for grimoires
  14. Automating creativity
  15. In Praise of Boring AI
  16. On holding back the strange AI tide
  17. How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide
  18. What AI can do with a toolbox... Getting started with Code Interpreter [Now called Advanced Data Analytics]
  19. The Homework Apocalypse
  20. On giving AI eyes and ears
  21. Detecting the Secret Cyborgs
  22. Assigning AI: Seven Ways of Using AI in Class
  23. Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button
  24. What happens when AI reads a book 🤖📖
  25. On-boarding your AI Intern
  26. Catastrophe / Eucatastrophe
  27. AI is not good software. It is pretty good people.
  28. It is starting to get strange.
  29. A guide to prompting AI (for what it is worth)
  30. Democratizing the future of education
  31. One sentence.
  32. The future of education in a world of AI
  33. Thinking companion, companion for thinking
  34. How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide
  35. Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?
  36. Acceleration.
  37. Using AI to make teaching easier & more impactful
  38. How to... use AI to unstick yourself
  39. Secret Cyborgs: The Present Disruption in Three Papers
  40. Feats to astonish and amaze
  41. Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI
  42. How to Get an AI to Lie to You in Three Simple Steps
  43. Blinded by Analogies
  44. The future, soon: what I learned from Bing's AI
  45. My class required AI. Here's what I've learned so far.
  46. I hope you weren't getting too comfortable.
  47. A quick and sobering guide to cloning yourself
  48. Magic for English Majors
  49. "Do not fear AI, puny humans... that is not meant as a threat."
  50. The Machines of Mastery
  51. A prosthesis for imagination: Using AI to boost your creativity
  52. The practical guide to using AI to do stuff
  53. Becoming strange in the Long Singularity
  54. All my classes suddenly became AI classes
  55. How to... use ChatGPT to boost your writing
  56. And the great gears begin to turn again...
  57. You can't brute force the unsolvable

2022 16

  1. Who believes more myths about humans: AI or educated humans?
  2. The street finds its own uses for things, AI Edition
  3. ChatGPT is my co-founder
  4. How to... use AI to teach some of the hardest skills
  5. Four Paths to the Revelation
  6. The Mechanical Professor
  7. How to... use AI to generate ideas
  8. AI has a strategy.
  9. This post, full of mysteries...
  10. How to... make people happy
  11. When the cackle-bladder isn't enough
  12. The 13 Watt Light Bulb and the Bulldozer on the Falcon...
  13. How to... have better meetings
  14. When Survivorship Bias meets Superstitious Learning
  15. The problem of management in two graphs
  16. How to... be more creative