30 Months on the Exponential (in Charts)
- ID
- 37515
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Oct 2026, 11:57 PM
- Fetched
- 21 Oct 2026, 1:44 AM
- Provider
- One Useful Thing
- Category
- research-analysis
- Original URL
- https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/30-months-on-the-exponential-in-charts
- Source URL
- https://www.oneusefulthing.org/feed
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 21 Oct 2026, 1:46 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_founders
What happened
Ethan Mollick marks the release of Co-Existence, 30 months after Co-Intelligence, and uses the gap to chart AI progress. He says he used Opus 5.5 in Claude Projects, with one orchestrator agent spawning sub-agents, to produce research, graphs, layouts, images, and citations in minutes, and that it caught a math error. The post cites 20 different models having held the top spot across Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, 180 models now better than GPT-4 at release, and 19 of those able to run on a modern smartphone.
Why it matters
For builders choosing models or designing agent workflows, the concrete signal is churn: a GPT-4-era baseline is no longer a useful default when 180 models beat it and 20 different models have led, so keep provider/model abstraction and re-run evals rather than hard-coding a leader. The Claude Projects orchestrator pattern also sets a practical bar for delegating multi-step work, but since the output included citations and math, build verification into any similar pipeline before shipping.
Discussion angle
Where is the line between delegating a multi-step build to an orchestrator agent and keeping human review, given the claim that the agent produced citations and caught a math error?