Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick
ISBN: 9780593716717Date read: 2025-06-10
How strongly I recommend it: 2/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
I was so excited to read this, hoping it would give new insights and expert tactics for getting more out of GenAI LLMs. But unfortunately it was almost nothing I didn’t know.
my notes
The machine known as the Mechanical Turk beat Ben Franklin and Napoleon in chess matches.
AI stores only the weights from its pretraining, not the underlying text it trained on, so it reproduces a work with similar characteristics but not a direct copy of the original pieces it trained on.
Whatever AI you are using right now is going to be the worst AI you will ever use.
LLMs are connection machines.
They are trained by generating relationships between tokens that may seem unrelated to humans but represent some deeper meaning.
Add in the randomness that comes with AI output, and you have a powerful tool for innovation.
Invite AI to your brainstorming sessions.
Tell AI who it is:
“You are an expert at marketing.
When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting.
You use clever wordplay.
You try not to repeat themes or ideas.”
AI will not naturally deliver novelty.
It tends to give the crowd-pleasing “average” answer that is most likely from its training data.
But we can make it deliver novelty with a little work.
Tell it to think this through step by step:
Come up with good analogies for an AI tutor.
First, list possible analogies.
Second, critique the list and add three more analogies.
Next, create a table listing pluses and minuses of each.
Next, pick the best and explain it.
Ask it to help you do the thing.
“I want to write a novel. What do you need to know to help me?”
To solve a new problem, we need lots of connected information stored in our long-term memory.
That means we need to learn many facts and understand how they are connected.
After that, we have to practice.