Ethan Mollick + Claude trace how a chain of accidents built ChatGPT
emollick · x · 2026-09-28
Inspired by the classic science show Connections, Ethan Mollick had Claude Opus 5.5 produce a video arguing that nearly every ingredient of ChatGPT was originally built for something else: from the 1943 McCulloch-Pitts artificial neuron (McCulloch wanted to know how brain tissue could do logic; Pitts was a teenage runaway and self-taught logician) through milestones like ImageNet. The companion site documents every factual claim in the video with primary sources—original papers and researchers' own slides—and notes where the video simplifies.
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