Today · post October 11

Mollick says lab changes slow AI uptake; sample is unstated

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick says one source of friction for large companies adopting AI is the labs themselves: products and models often change without warning. He says he has talked with several leaders of large companies: the models are good enough that companies can always find a way to use them, and the real friction is organizational change plus the labs' frequent, sudden changes. One leader had bet heavily on OpenAI's GPTs (a feature that lets users build their own custom ChatGPT) just last month, only to see it shut down; he also named Google for forcing model switches and said it isn't only OpenAI (Ethan Mollick, 2026-10-11). He grants that GPTs had indeed outlived their usefulness. This is his observation from talking with a few leaders; he doesn't say how large the sample is. Our reading: fear of a vendor suddenly switching models may also be one reason companies keep an open-weight model of their own; Mollick doesn't say that. How we checked →

Concept illustration in two side-by-side panels. Each panel shows a woman with long dark hair, in black clothes and white sneakers, sitting on a chair and facing an oversized laptop on a table; the laptop's keyboard deck is lettered OPENAI GPTS next to a green knot-like symbol. In the left panel the laptop screen is red-orange with a white speech bubble holding grey lines, and in the otherwise matching right panel the screen is plain pale grey.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 12, 2026, alongside 13 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Mollick says lab changes slow AI uptake; sample is unstated." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-10-12-2/. Accessed access date.