Co-lead / Director @Google AI x Economy Program. AP (on leave) @Wharton. Cofounder @workhelix. Everyone can just do stuff and that's {good, bad}.

Philadelphia, PA
Joined December 2008
Embedded in this post is a glimmer of the new future deal for juniors to build expertise and become senior workers: verification work that their managers don’t have as much time to do. We’re all managers now. In some ways this is a more direct path.
I can see where @jasonfurman is coming from, but I also agree with Claudia, in the particular case of CEA. From Furman’s probable perspective (my speculation)- a senior person’s day is usually chalked full with meetings and multi activities that require constant context switching, leaving little time for playing with data yourself and a dependence on support staff / economists to process the data. The ability to now not depend on anyone, as a senior person, is very very empowering. Now, with just the idea, a senior person can go far. On top of that, the dopamine hit from Claude is real. After years of needing research assistants, you suddenly realize you don’t need to ask people for things, or to wait for answers. Got questions? Got answers NOW, exactly answered in the way you want it. How do I know? It so happens that recently my nightly activities have been spent on building tools (for myself) on how I like to visualize economics. I am probably just a month behind Furman. But now to Claudia’s point — CEA is a very important institution in the White House. Among the many things it does, it fact checks important economic speeches of White House characters. It tells politicians they are wrong in a place where people tend to say yes. AI requires fact checking — in the high stakes world of POTUS speeches, you can’t even allow a 0.05% chance of an AI hallucination on it. Second, CEA briefs principals confidentially ahead of data releases due to market sensitivity. These releases are sent in via physical paper in manila folders. With the cyber security concerns around AI, it is inconceivable that AI can substitute for the human required to do the job. Third, to Claudia, CEA spawned a lot of people who go on to do things. I am one of them. So is @tdurie95 in my team. Without that experience, I can 100% say would not have the kind of world view that I have now. Which opens an interesting question about AI — in the productivity literature about GPT (general purpose technology), that type of innovation is supposed to spawn more innovation in a nonlinear way. But whatif AI’s productivity impact is actually front loaded? (Ppl who follows my writings would know that I insist that labor productivity impact from AI is already showing up strong in earnings, though absent in national statistics, which i believe will be revised up years later). AI allows people with extensive experience to scale their expertise. But AI also raised the entry barrier for any white collar jobs, slowing the supply pipeline of human experts. As the current generation of experts age, the size of the new generation of experts was not enough to replace the previous generation of experts. As a result the spawn rate of ideas slow. Entering into sci fi speculation— as humans were not about to replace the aging experts due to low pipeline of young human experts, AI themselves, through the training over the years, became the one spawning the ideas. That seems like a disaster waiting to happen that current social policy needs to address.
2
2
1
26
1,993
Who wants the high growth side?
Replying to @ben_moll
If you want to join: ... on the high-growth side, just let me know ... on the "low"-growth side, you need to find your own counterparty, then let me know Minimum stakes = $10k
1
1
5
1,276
Daniel Rock retweeted
Just spent the last 7 days on the front lines of the vulnpocalypse fending off an active cyber attack on one of our products. Some thoughts: - Software factories are going to be required equipment for everyone. There’s just no way to keep up with the pace of highly automated adversaries without one. - We were lucky because we had spent the last few months getting our software factory running well. It is nice to have for product development but proved to be absolutely essential this week. - At the minimum you need to have a coding server in the cloud pre-provisioned with read only access to all your logs and all the services you depend on for observability. With that in place you are a prompt away from reasonably good situational awareness, ongoing monitoring with loops, and ability for coding agents to validate fixes against your actual, observed attack patterns. - Shared coding server also unlocks multiplayer incident response where everyone can see every session and jump in as needed. Sharing session links that can be forked is much higher bandwidth than re-explaining things. - You don’t need to be Ramp/Stripe/Uber scale to have a working software factory in the cloud. We are a team of 3. Ours is built with an @opencode server (thanks @thdxr!), a forked version of compound engineering optimized for automated workflows (thanks @kieranklaassen!) and a multiplayer agent in slack that handles crons (we have our own harness but pick your favorite here). - To get our software factory up and running well, we had to stop all new product development for ~6 weeks and just focus on getting the validation systems working that enabled us to reliably shipping PR without human code review. This felt very painful in the moment but was totally worth the eventual speedup in velocity. - KYC for @AnthropicAI & @OpenAI cyber programs is now easy and quick (at least for defensive access), but a day felt like a lifetime this week. Submit your app now before you really need it. - Getting Mythos access unlocked a deeper level of analysis that helped us shift from reactive mitigation to proactive patching. Wish we had done this a few weeks earlier. Get started now!
67
148
57
1,796
237,290
Daniel Rock retweeted
Bears beat the Patriots and Jets for us Bills beat the Lions for the bears, and play the packers and Vikings later this season Y’all got us bears fans, we will make sure to get you right back 🫡
410
281
104
7,910
267,976
In 1945, an American soldier crept into a German position and stole roughly 50 horses from the Nazis. As he escaped on horseback, he sang a traditional Crow war song while German soldiers opened fire. He wasn't just fighting for America. He was completing an ancient warrior tradition passed down by his ancestors. When he returned to Montana, his people declared him a war chief. This is the story of Joe Medicine Crow..🧵1/5
29
384
20
2,481
53,694
Daniel Rock retweeted
Honestly, I was surprised @WSJ wanted to do a profile on me. 😂 I’m not a cool 20-year-old college dropout. I’m a pretty boring 40-year-old trying to put everything I’ve learned throughout my career to work building a new market infrastructure for compute. And if I succeed, the headline won’t be true for very long. Wall Street will have the data, transparency, and tools to understand, price, and manage compute risk better than I ever could. And that would be the real success.
18
13
5
235
28,082
Daniel Rock retweeted
Consider that the people who were right about AI-enabled cyberattacks might be right about AI-enabled bioweapons
SITUATION DETECTED: CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says he is aware of additional severe vulnerabilities in other pieces of critical software, and said “I think we’re going to have a couple years where every single week it’s going to feel like the sky is falling,” per Reuters.
26
107
21
1,102
95,681
I was happy to see the Knicks win last year but this garbage is awful
What the actual fuck have I just read
5
631
Daniel Rock retweeted
Hi all, I have a new result I'm excited to share. It turns out that *all existing implementations* of softmax and cross-entropy (that's JAX, PyTorch, textbooks, etc) have a subtle bug --- two bugs, actually. A simple rewrite fixes both, and eliminates "slingshots" when grokking:
133
767
140
6,291
735,056
here's some good stuff
Woooooowww. This is the confirmation we’ve been waiting for! Moderna and Merck’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 42% when added to Keytruda after surgery, compared with Keytruda alone! And yes, it uses the same mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines!
8
786
Daniel Rock retweeted
🐻⬇️
61
255
6
1,852
63,644
not great
Quest Diagnostics has been hacked. Patient data was exposed. They serve roughly half of U.S. hospitals and physicians. Investigation ongoing.
1
12
867
Daniel Rock retweeted
slowly and then all at once. this is way more important than bots that live in your text messages and book your flights or whatever
A watershed for FDA regulation. Every patient on the vaccine arm got a different product, with neoantigens chosen from sequencing of each person's own tumor. So FDA had no single active sequence to review. The IND pre-specified how the product would change for each patient.
2
5
15
3,011
Daniel Rock retweeted
Thanks @danielrock for bringing this one to my attention. For anyone else who is interested, I discuss these ideas in more detail here: xitter.cf/MartinBeraja/status/20…
AI companies trained their models on web content no one clearly owned. Now courts are deciding who does. This looks unprecedented. It isn't — it's how innovation and growth at the resource frontier have always worked.
1
1
342
Daniel Rock retweeted
The Napster analogy misses a broader historical pattern. Oil prospectors drawing from shared reservoirs, radio broadcasters occupying airwaves, advertising platforms collecting consumer data, and now AI companies training on creative works. Time and again, innovators pushing the resource frontier moved first, appropriating resources before the rights governing their use were settled. Conflict followed. And more often than not, the taking that followed the making was legitimized after the fact. Napster faced a different situation. Property rights in recorded music were relatively well established, and Napster was a small outsider confronting a powerful incumbent industry. In that respect, it was closer to DuPont's development of plastics, where the petrochemical inputs had identifiable owners and access had to be negotiated. AI is different on both counts. Whether training on creative works constitutes fair use remains contested, and the leading AI companies have vastly greater economic and political clout than Napster ever did. The broader historical lesson is that the prospect of appropriating resources can itself spur frontier innovation. Far from being merely an unfortunate consequence of it, appropriation and conflict are often part of the very process of economic growth.
Back in late 2023, when the New York Times first sued OpenAI, I went on a podcast and called it the Napster moment for AI. Napster was the most popular thing on the internet in 1999, got sued almost immediately, and was gone by 2001. The lawsuit didn't really turn on the money. It turned on the precedent: a business built to take everything first and sort out the rights later got ruled flatly wrong, and that ruling is what let every rights holder line up behind it to collect. Back then my read was that the AI companies would eventually license the material they'd been scraping, because fighting every rights holder one at a time is a worse business than just paying them. Since 2023 the licensing deals have stacked up, Axel Springer, the AP, News Corp, Reddit. The Times case itself is still grinding on with no ending. I don't think the real lesson is about AI, though. Any business built on taking something it didn't get permission for eventually pays for it or gets rebuilt around not having it. That's the actual reason we went the opt-in route on our data years ago, back when opt-in just looked slow. I've watched which side of that fight usually wins.
1
2
7
898
I’m starting to wonder if models are in a kind of uncanny valley (@hamsabastani and @dellacquafabri have papers to this effect). Often people complain that a model hallucinated still. They all do that sometimes! Theyll also try to delete your whole computer sometimes. Don’t be lulled… you still have to pay attention.
1
7
838
Daniel Rock retweeted
I think this concept will be an important train & test objective going forward: take a paper's codebase, remove the key parts and see if an agent can code them from scratch *and* add improvements. More tasks coming soon!
FrontierCS 2 is our new benchmark for CS research & development. Each task is based on a paper: we delete the contribution from the released code, and ask agents to outdo the original method, as judged by the authors' chosen metrics. Agents don't have access to the paper or web.
11
5
65
5,364
there are lessons for today's internet/vulnerabilities from the introduction of HFT into financial markets. verification of flow, designed network structures to block or intermediate potentially damaging traffic, circuit breakers, correlated activity leading to herding. without redesign of our systems we're going to lose a lot, with redesign we'll see new possibilities. we need the "immune system" as @AndrewWLo would say
1
7
562
Don’t be silly enough to connect agents to your bank 🤦‍♂️
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
2
16
1,067