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Well, we continue our year-end series today talking about artificial intelligence, which obviously we have
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seen have a growing influence on our lives. But as we turn the calendar into 2026,
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what should everybody think about where AI is and what it is going to continue to develop into into the next year?
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Pleasure to be joined by Ethan Mollik, associate professor here at the Wharton School. Hi, Ethan. How are you today?
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>> Excellent. Thanks for having me. Okay, so we're coming towards the end of the
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year and as we are doing this with this variety of interviews, where do you think we are right now in terms of the
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development of AI in terms of how we use it, how we think about it, and maybe even more importantly, what we should
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expect going in to the next year. >> So I think the biggest news from the last year is that there hasn't been a
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slowdown in AI. I mean obviously everyone's discussing about financial bubbles and other concerns that we can
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discuss but the biggest issue from somebody who if you look past what the ups and downs of the market are who wins
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or who loses it's that we haven't hit the wall yet that AI development continues to progress that AI models
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have gotten much smarter and better that um you know for example um there about 2.5% of super forecasters which um
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professor Phil Tedlock who's another warden professor has been famously tracking thought that the AI models
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would get a gold in the international math Olympics by 2025. That's 2.5%. Uh
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it turned out that it um that both Google and OpenAI got golds at the international math Olympics this year
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with AI models. So we're we're seeing very rapid gains uh still continue and
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from a business perspective it seems like there is more and more confidence by the seauite and by leadership up and
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down the chain that AI is something that they can use as an important tool moving
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forward for their businesses on a day-to-day basis. Yes. So I mean we've seen surveys by fellow Wharton
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professors on this exact topic showing that a very high percentage of of seuite people are suggesting that they're
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getting returns from AI now which is a big change from earlier in this year. I mean I there's no sign of momentum
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slowing down in terms of actual adoption. We've hit a billion users of AI on a regular basis. Again, you know,
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the questions about business and economics and environment, they're all kind of separate and but intertwined
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kinds of issues there, >> right? And one of which is about labor and how it's going to impact the labor
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market. And some companies, as you know, we got towards the end of 2025, uh, making job cuts. A lot of companies will
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be doing that anyway. But the question, I think, for a lot of people is, will AI
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have a significant impact on the labor force moving forward? I think some people say that it will work in unison
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with employees. Other people say it would replace them. I wish I had a crystal ball even though this is about
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looking forward. I mean, I think the fair thing to say is that AI is probably not responsible for large-scale labor
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market changes yet as of the end of 2025. Although Eric Bolson and company at Har at Stanford have a paper
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suggesting that there's less juniors being hired and more senior people in fields like software. But it really is
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unclear at this point. I don't think there's any mass employment from AI, but
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if you look at where the goal of the AI companies are, it's to be able to build
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as a machine smarter than a human in the next couple of years to replace all human labor. Uh I mean, I I think it's a
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little unrealistic they're going to get there, but we also can't count that out.
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Um so I think we're going to see this happen. I think the big debate is how do
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we do this in a way that's proworker, pro-human rather than as just a way of deploying
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or replacement for people. Looking at it from a technology perspective, we already are starting to hear how quantum
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computing will have an impact on our culture. But how do you see generative AI continuing to to differ from a
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variety of other technological developments that may have an impact uh on our society moving forward? I mean I
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I in a lot of ways Gen AI is the sort of big one that's clear. Um you know we
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talk about quantum, we could talk about fusion, but those are not those are future technologies. Again, there's a
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billion people using generative AI models on a weekly basis right now, right? We have evidence that they can do
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hard level jobs, that they can do hard level math, that they can, you know, people are treating these things as
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companions. They're getting help with school for better, for worse. I mean, that's already here. I mean, the change
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is baked in. We could stop with AI development today and have 10 years of disruption as we figure stuff out. So, I
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I always try and draw a line between quantum computing, might change everything, but we are still at
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experimental quantum computers. AI is deployed at scale already. Um, and you know, for better or for worse, I it's
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become a major industry. >> Where then is the the growth in terms of the use of of generative AI, do you
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think in the in the next several months and and years? >> I mean, right now there's no sign of a
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slowdown in the growth of AI adoption. Um, it's going to move, I think, increasingly inside organizations. We're
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seeing organizational adoption increase as well. and organizations are have to rethink processes and approaches to
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figure out how to use AI effectively. It can't just be chat bots where people ask
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write my essay for me or summarize this data for me. It's going to have to be a
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deeper form of interaction. So, be watching for that kind of agentic work starting to appear where people work
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deeply with AI, assign AI tasks that it completes and so on. >> You've talked in the past about, you
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know, certain guard rails and having guardrails up around some of this. How important are the guard rails uh as we
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move forward? So the guard rails um are an important part of long-term AI safety and also the
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immediate safety. We know people consult AI on psychological matters, legal matters, medical issues. Having the AI
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answer accurately and correctly and tell people to seek help when needed and you
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know provide and refuse to answer when it's ethical to do so remains a very large problem.
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>> Ethan, great to talk to you again. Thanks very much for your time. All the
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best. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Ethan Mollik, associate professor here at the Wharton School.