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Ethan Mollick Profile picture
@emollick
Apr 1, 2021 • 7 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
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A brief thread on color differentiation!

We have a huge number of words for color in English, as Ingrid Sundberg's Color Thesaurus shows. 1/n ingridsundberg.com/2014/02/04/the…
But different cultures group colors differently. This chart based on research by Gibson and Conway shows the difficulty of communicating a color. The colors to the left are easiest to communicate since they are most distinct (white and red in English). 2/n theconversation.com/languages-dont…
But the emotional associations with colors are remarkably similar across cultures. 3/n
You can test your own ability to differentiate among colors by sight with this puzzle game. 4/n kuku-kube.com
The rest of the thread describes real colors, but this image can generate impossible-to-render colors too:
🔵Stygian blue: a blue both totally blue & impossibly black
🔴Self-luminous red: a red that is brighter than white
🟠Hyperbolic orange: more orange than 100% orange color
5/
And there is always, always an appropriate xkcd, in this case a survey determining consensus viewsof what name to give each color rendered on a screen. blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/col…

You can play with these using the color controversy game (via @mattgroh) 6/ colorcontroversy.com
Colors can have a big influence on how we feel about the world. Here’s an example of how much choosing the right color matters, even where you wouldn’t expect it. 👇

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More from @emollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Apr 24
Microsoft keeps launching Copilot tools that seem interesting but which I can't ever seem to locate. Can't find them in my institution's enterprise account, nor my personal account, nor the many Copilot apps or copilots to apps or Agents for copilots

Each has their own UIs. 🤷‍♂️ Image
For a while in 2023, Microsoft, with its GPT-4-powered Bing, was the absolute leader in making LLMs accessible and easy to use.
Even Amazon made Nova accessible through a simple URL.

Make your products easy to experiment with and people will discover use cases. Make them impossible without some sort of elaborate IT intervention and nobody will notice and they will just go back to ChatGPT or Gemini.
Read 5 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 24
As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and building in AI education, and sees huge potential, I have been shown this headline a lot

I am sure Alpha School is doing interesting things, but there is no deployed AI tutor yet that drives up test scores like this implies. Image
I am not doubting their test results, but I would want to learn more about the role AI is playing, and what they mean by AI tutor, before attributing their success to AI as opposed to the other dials they are turning.

AI tutoring is still being understood
Google has been doing a lot of work on fine-tuning Gemini for learning, and you can see a good overview of the issues and approaches in their paper (which also tests some of our work on tutor prompts). arxiv.org/abs/2412.16429Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 15
I suspect that a lot of "AI training" in companies and schools has become obsolete in the last few months

As models get larger, the prompting tricks that used to be useful are no longer good; reasoners don't play well with Chain-of-Thought; hallucination rates have dropped, etc.
I think caution is warranted when teaching prompting approaches for individual use or if training is trying to define clear lines about tasks where AI is bad/good. Those areas are changing very rapidly.
None of this is the fault of trainers - I have taught my students how to do Chain-of-thought, etc. But we need to start to think about how to teach people to use AI in a world that is changing quite rapidly. Focusing on exploration and use, rather than a set of defined rules.
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 8
“GPT-4.5, Give me a secret history ala Borges. Tie together the steel at Scapa Flow, the return of Napoleon from exile, betamax versus VHS, and the fact that Kafka wanted his manuscripts burned. There should be deep meanings and connections”

“Make it better” a few times… Image
It should have integrated the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet better but it knocked the Betamax thing out of the park
Dang, Claude. This is just half the thing.

Full story here: docs.google.com/document/d/1-h…Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Mar 4
🚨Our Generative AI Lab at Wharton is releasing its first Prompt Engineering Report, empirically testing prompting approaches. This time we find:
1) Prompting “tricks” like saying “please” do not help consistently or predictably
2) How you measure against benchmarks matters a lot Image
Image
Using social science methodologies for measuring prompting results helped give us some useful insights, I think. Here’s the report, the first of hopefully many to come. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
This is what complicates things. Making a polite request ("please") had huge positive effects in some cases and negative ones in others. Similarly being rude ("I order you") helped in some cases and not others.

There was no clear way to predict in advance which would work when. Image
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Feb 25
The lack of benchmarks for writing, telling stories, persuasion, creativity, emotional intelligence, perceived empathy, and doing office work are...

(1) holding back AI advances, (2) hiding big differences between models & (3) obscuring how good these models are for real work
If you want to influence the future, now is the time to release a really good benchmark.
We are getting AIs optimized for coding, doing graduate level math, multiple choice exams, and also counting the r's in strawberry.
Read 4 tweets

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