The Dot and the Swarm
I generally think I have done a good job anticipating the direction and pace of AI over the few years I have been writing this Substack, but I think I recently got something fairly large wrong.
Proof1 independent outlet
Key points
- In the last year I have been posting about how I suspected that humans would have to approach working with agents as a manager, deciding how to delegate work to agents and specifying how those agents should be organized.
- The Bitter Lesson is everywhere among AI startups and companies adopting AI.
- People built elaborate templates and chains of prompts that walked the AI through a task one step at a time.
- OpenAI has now released a competitor tool, called dots.
Sources (1)
- [1]The Dot and the SwarmOne Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) · Oct 1, 10:54 AM
I generally think I have done a good job anticipating the direction and pace of AI over the few years I have been writing this Substack, but I think I recently got something fairly large wrong.
In the last year I have been posting about how I suspected that humans would have to approach working with agents as a manager, deciding how to delegate work to agents and specifying how those agents should be organized.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
Before this
- Sep 30, 2026Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence
- Sep 30, 2026Last Week in AI #345 - 5 new models, 9 misalignment incidents, some Dots
- Sep 30, 2026[AINews] OpenAI DevDay 2026: Dots, 6.1 Sol, Ultrafast, Decisions API, Agents API, Spaces, Marketplace, and 1.2 Billion ChatGPT WAU
- Sep 29, 2026Sonnet 5.5 is worth a try
- Sep 29, 2026[AINews] AMD buys World Labs for $8.2B, as Atlas solves sparse reconstruction problem for robotics, design and more
- Sep 29, 2026Claude Code’s Next Era — Thariq Shihipar, Anthropic
