Ethan Mollick Criticizes X Reply Bots and Questions Their Purpose

Shanghai Jiao Tong University Antai College of Economics and Management is reshaping its MBA education to prepare business leaders who can combine technical understanding with business judgment and responsibility. Its “Five Links” talent framework connects AI, science and technology innovation, industry, global perspectives, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University resources. The college also plans to co-create 1,000 AI projects with companies over the next decade and has announced curriculum and training changes for the 2027 cohort.

I really don’t understand the point of the AI slop comments flooding my posts. At least on LinkedIn they are pushing fake expertise to make their posters look good (it doesn’t, but whatever). But what is gained by dozens of anonymous bots making similar replies to posts like this? https://t.co/rM8ywQCrwA

STEPX unveiled its STEPX Neo early-access edition on October 13, combining Step AOS 1.0, personal agent Amoo, and phone hardware for 3,999 yuan. The phone pairs local execution with cloud-based task planning, while Step Studio lets developers create apps, agents, and Skills using natural language. Buyers receive 12 months of 10 billion tokens per month; the article lists presales for October 13 at 21:00 and general sales for October 16 at 10:13.

Google released Gemini 4 Argon globally for coding, knowledge work, enterprise workflows and cyber defense, with access through the Gemini API and several Google products. Introductory API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input discounted 95%; Artificial Analysis reports rates double after November 30. At AI Engineer NYC, about 20,000 people joined keynotes on AI and finance, including a discussion of benchmarking models like Argon by Vals AI’s CEO.

Shing-Tung Yau and leading Chinese mathematicians launched the Yau Laboratory Alliance for Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence on Sunday in Beijing, according to the South China Morning Post. It unites eight institutions and aims to connect over 1,000 researchers, with plans for specialized models, machine-verifiable proofs, and transparent AI reasoning. Meanwhile, 25 Fields Medal winners, including Terence Tao and Peter Scholze, worry that AI-generated proofs erode mathematical understanding and encourage dependence on tools researchers cannot follow.

Andrej Karpathy describes four tiers of LLM exposure, arguing that public perceptions lag behind capabilities experienced by frontier-system users. He estimates roughly six billion people have barely encountered LLMs, one to two billion use casual chatbot products, 20 million use frontier models professionally in math and code, and 5,000 access internal frontier systems. He claims those internal systems coordinate thousands of agents on projects that would take experts years, while human review falls behind, and attributes progress in coding and math to reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards and commercial training priorities.

Import AI 476 covers Humanity’s Sixth Sense, a benchmark from Elorian and Scale AI that tests intuitive visual reasoning. People scored 93.1 aggregate pass@1, while GPT 6 Astra scored 53.6; GLM-5.3-flash and Kimi K3 scored 26.8 and 25.5. The newsletter also examines how AI could accelerate space development and reports on TasteVal, a benchmark of AI systems’ research taste.

Claude banned 11.4 million accounts in the first half of 2026, according to an Anthropic report published in July that was recently recirculated. Of 398,000 appeals submitted, 42,000 were successful. Anthropic did not disclose a full breakdown of the reasons for bans, but the report listed several types of activity that may trigger them.

It has become disheartening that the average replybot on this site has shifted its replyslop angle to asking interesting questions. It feels like actual intellectual engagement, which makes it somehow worse than just rephrasing the post with a "that's the part people miss" bit.