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Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
  1. Creators/
  2. Ethan Mollick — One Useful Thing/

The twilight of the chatbots

Newsletter · Read

  • Core argument: AI capability is improving “better than exponentially” in autonomous task execution, and workplace usage is shifting from chatbot-style collaboration toward agent-based delegation.
  • Findings: METR and the UK AI Security Institute track programmer-equivalent-hours per prompt and find accelerating gains; Epoch found Claude Opus running autonomously for 14 hours could produce 2-17 weeks’ worth of human engineering for $251 in token costs; Mollick’s own tests had Fable running unsupervised for 9 hours, equivalent to team-weeks of work.
  • Frontier vs. near-frontier: US closed models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) lead, while open-weight Chinese models (Kimi K3, DeepSeek, Qwen) lag 6-12 months but follow their own exponential improvement curve.
  • OpenAI internal data shows 25% of workers run four or more agents weekly, with non-coding roles adopting agents at rates similar to engineers; research on Claude Code users found domain expertise — not job title — predicts who extracts the most value per interaction.