Ethan Mollick on the twilight of chatbots and the rise of agent-run work

Ethan Mollick argues that AI use is shifting from chatbot co-intelligence toward long-running agents that need less human intervention, and that this change is happening fast. He cites METR, the UK AI Security Institute and GDPval benchmarks rising faster than exponential, plus an Epoch finding that Opus 4.7 worked alone for 14 hours to build a software package estimated at 2-17 weeks of human engineering for $251 in tokens. An OpenAI and academic economists study found a quarter of OpenAI workers run at least four agents weekly, with legal and HR adopting at nearly the same rate as coders, and a Claude Code study found domain expertise, not profession, predicted success.