Wharton professor concedes he underestimated AI self-organization
Ethan Mollick retracts his view that humans must design agent coordination like managers; a personal judgment, with cited cases unverified.
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick wrote on October 1 that he was wrong to believe humans would need to manage AI agents like managers, carefully designing how they coordinate.
Organizing work, he now argues, is just one more thing AI can learn to do: newer models plan their own steps, and agents pick up context from conversations without elaborate human-built scaffolding. He attributes this to the Bitter Lesson — brute-force learning beating hand-crafted rules.
His evidence includes OpenAI's September 8 announcement of a Navier-Stokes proof produced by thousands of agents in about 88 hours, which he describes as having a remarkably thin coordination structure; these are his own retellings, and the proof has not been formally accepted.
Sources:https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-dot-and-the-swarm