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