Ethan Mollick Declares 'The Twilight of the Chatbots' as Models Shift From Chat to Autonomous Work
One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick)·medium signal
In a June 30 essay, Ethan Mollick argues the chat-window era is ending as frontier models pivot to doing real, multi-step work, citing METR and the UK AI Security Institute measurements of how much human programmer effort a single prompt can now replace. He notes the paradox that capability is accelerating even as U.S. government action has cut public access to two of the most powerful models (Claude Fable and GPT-5.6). The builder takeaway: evaluate models by task-completion horizon, not conversational feel.